What eats Bubble Algae?

how bad is it i remove the rocks and cut the hold fast off with a xacto knife rinse in tank water twice and put back in tank discard rinse water.if you have an extra set of hands you can off in tank but cutting and siphoning off stopping and starting the siphon and cutting needs at least 4 hands
 
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+1 Brian. Emerals crabs are about the only thing I've heard eats it. If you can remove manually it's the best way. Just be careful not to op the bubbles and add more spores to the tank. If you can remove the piece of LR or coral from the tank and remove its even better then you can rinse off before you put it back in.
 
Hello red mithrax crabs will tend to eat bubble algae faster than emeralds but anything that is eating it is opening it up and releasing spores in the tank.in turn that will make more bubble algae.an aquarium is really a circle and sometimes its a viscous circle.manual removal is really the best option
 
red mithrax crabs = red emerald crab.

And they are actually very good about eating the spores and not releasing them into the rest of your tank
 
Okay I have a ton of this stuff. Its a long story so I will keep it short. Before I got my "free" tank it was over run with this stuff, I mean like golf ball sized BA. I have learned a lot about it. One you cant just pull out the rock and scrub it. You will need to take some of the substrate with the BA when you remove it or it WILL grow back. I have tried to pick it off and it just grows back, you NEED to remove all of the foot or hold fast. I have been very frustrated with this stuff to the point of wanting to start over with a new tank and rock! SO after awhile I decided that it didn't bother me and when it got bad I just ripped as much off as I could in the tank then sucked out the left over bits. I thought this might cause a even more major outbreak, it didn't. The BA did not spread, I have some rocks that have none on it and others are covered with it. It is now so bad that some of the older pieces of BA are covered with coralline. This seems to kill it after 3 or 4 months and it does not grow back. It also does not like to grow on coralline, but seems to thrive on bare rock.

So if you have only a few spots of it try to remove the rock and chip off part of the rock with the BA. Emerald crabs do work in my case I would need 2 or 3 hundred of them. Really! I currently have 5. If you don't mind crabs I would put in at least 5 to control any further out breaks, they seem to like the smaller pieces of BA. When they get to dime size they wont eat them.
 
I have some the size of quarters Ill get you a pic. I grow this stuff like crazy. I am telling you, you really don't want it in your tank!
 
little_fish said:
red mithrax crabs = red emerald crab.

And they are actually very good about eating the spores and not releasing them into the rest of your tank
Click to expand...
red mithrax crab[mithrax rubus}
emerald crab {mithrax sculpus]

the red ones are actually found in greater numbers on offshore reefs than the green ones..
 
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