Battling GHA

[Coral Reef To Classroom]

I've been battling GHA awhile by physical removal and GFO. The amount of GHA growing back has reduced significantly and most of what is left is a light green to brownish color. I feel like I am close to winning this fight. Phosphates and nitrates are near zero. I am afraid to stress out my corals by bottoming out nutrients. Is it safe for me to continue attacking with GFO? How do I avoid bottoming out nutrients?

 

[NJTaxMan]

DO NOT bottom out your nutrients. Dinos are much worse than GHA. If you got ahead of the GHA and are winning, up your clean up crew. Add a bunch of hermit crabs...they will mow through it in a few days if you already got a lot of it gone. If you are near zero..i would pull the GFO.

 

[Yates273]

Depending on how much, try targeting the GHA with hydrogen peroxide and a syringe.

 

[Rueric]

im in a similar boat, GHA is starting to creep up.. does the GHA whittle down if we keep nutrients at a 10:1 niratehosphate ratio?

 

[Jph]

Someone on here said it best: “you don’t have an algae problem, you have a herbivore problem.” I too recently patches of hair algae in my tank. When I read that I went out bought a fresh batch of tuxedo urchins, pulled out as much as I could by hand, and let them handle the rest.

 

[Foxchase]

I got no GHA in tank but my sump is full which I don't mind bc it helps with nutrients. Key is to manually remove as much as possible and then get a large clean up crew consisting of snails, crabs, fish that will eat it, and/or even an urchin.

 

[Rjmul]

Buy turbo snails. Don't bottom out nutrients.

 

[eholceker]

If you have good biodiversity in your tank bottoming out nutrients to get starve algea will not cause dino's. It can starve your corals though so be careful.

 

[Coral Reef To Classroom]

Thanks for the advice on the GFO. I will keep up manual removal and add more CUC. I've noticed my tomini tang has been regularly picking at it where not to long ago it had no interest. So I am pretty excited about that. I am glad I asked. I see it disappearing and I want to knock it out but I also knew removing all the nutrients would cause worse problems. Certainly not an easy or quick fix so I need to be patient.