petemela

Can Some one Help me out. Cause these Bristlenoses arnt working as hard as i wanted them to :P

sick-lid boy

I don't know the BEST way, but I can tell you that Otocinclus Catfish (Otto) do an amazing job on algae. I recently got four of these little guys for my 80 gallon tank and they had all the glass in the whole tank spotless in about 3 days.

Actually, a great way to get rid of algae on the glass is a magnetic glass cleaner. It's a two piece device.. one piece goes inside the tank and has a velcro-like cleaning pad to scrub the algae.. the other piece has a magnet that holds the first piece against the glass. It allows you to clean the glass on the inside of your tank by guiding the scrubber from the outside of the tank. Very handy little tool. Here's one example, but there's lots of different kinds. This is just the first one I happened to find on the net. (and also has the biggest url I have ever seen in my life)

http://www.petsmart.com/global/produ...N=2030062&Ne=2

A magnetic tank scrubber + a few Ottos = a virtually algae-free tank. Let the Ottos concentrate on the rocks, plants and decorations and use the scrubber on the glass.

Luniyn

One thing to note about those magnetic glass cleaners is that most of them are not safe for acrylic tanks and are only to be used on glass tanks (they will scratch the acrylic).

Oto's are great little work horses provided you have good water conditions. I know a few people and there are a few members on this board that have had a tough time keeping these little guys healthy, though others have had no problems at all. Aside from them though, it might be a good idea to take measures to prevent the algae from even forming to begin with. To that end, do you have live plants in your tank or do you leave your lights on all day? If you have plants, then you can break up your light cycle to 5 hours on, 2 hours off, and 5 hours on again. Algae generally needs a non-stop photosynthesis cycle to grow. If it starts on the cycle and then all of a sudden loses it's light source, it breaks it's cycle and has to start all over again and never gets a chance to thrive. If you don't have live plants, then if you have ambient light in the room (from windows or whatever) then it's ok to leave the lights off when you aren't around to enjoy them. Also speaking of windows, is the tank near a window where it's getting exposed to sunlight? If so and you can move it out of direct sunlight then that will help a lot. If you can't move it out of the locations it's in, then maybe a screen for the tank or shades for the window would go a long way to lessen the amount of algae growth. Another cause of rapid algae growth is high phosphates in your tank. Without live plants in the tank to absorb them, the algae have all they want to eat available to them. Check your food that you feed, they should have low phosphate %'s (like less then 1% preferably). More frequent (but smaller) water changes might be in order too as nitrate is a good source of food for algae as well. So there are a lot of things you can do to keep it from growing in the first place.

MelissaF672

Whatever you do DON'T use Algae-fix. The way it works is it deprives the algae of oxygen and it dies off, in the process it either makes some fish very uncomfortable or in some cases like with clown loaches because they don't have scales but delicate 'skin' it can, will... and HAS killed them! Poor things. I'll never make that mistake again. The best bet is to find the source of the problem.. algae need some kind of light maybe the lights you are using are helping it to grow along or maybe your tank is next to a window.
Anyhow thats all the advice i have. Good luck!

griffin

while i'm also against using algae-fix, i'm curious as to what your source is that it cuts off the oxygen supply? it might just be me, but that doesn't make sense to me

i've also used it before, and it didn't affect my fish at all (as far as i could tell)

MelissaF672

My mentor from a local pet store whom i consider to be a reliable source described the way it worked to me in that way although i'm sure there's probably a better way of describing it... either believe it or not i don't care

But ask yourself this..... How else would you imagine it killed the algae? ..... is there a SAFE way to kill anything?

After using it and losing fish i called around and that seemed to be the consensus between my fishy friends and local breeders as well. Although not all the fish died ALL of them were darting around the tank breathing rapidly. I would just steer clear of it no matter how you think it works.