Algae eating fish and growing green algae

bushynose_cory · Post by **bushynose_cory** » 03 Jun 2007, 02:52

What kinds of fish eat algae, and what kind? It would be nice if I had a list of them on handy, so I can easily know which to get.

Otos: Brown
Ancistrus: Green(But yesterday, one little one inch one ate all the brown algae off my new thrity gallon!)
American flagfish: Black?
SAE: Hair algae
Amano algae-eating shrimp(Not a fish): ?
Anything more?

Also, how can I acually grow the green algae? It would really be nice if I had a big stock of it to feed my Lake Tanganika Tropheus c******ds and my catfish(namely otos and ancistrus)

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

bronzefry · Post by **bronzefry** » 03 Jun 2007, 18:38

I sometimes place one or two medium-sized rocks in a one liter plastic container with some water from a fish tank. I then place the container with the rocks in it on a sunny window sill. In a few days, the rocks take on a bit of slime. A day or so after that, the water turns green. I'm sure there are many ways to do this. I'd be interested in hearing how other people "grow" their green water.

Amanda

kcmt01 · Post by **kcmt01** » 03 Jun 2007, 19:17

If you can arrange the location of your tank so that it gets just a little direct sunlight, you will probably have more green algae than you know what to do with.

bushynose_cory · Post by **bushynose_cory** » 04 Jun 2007, 08:23

Both of my tanks get natural sunlight, but only brown algae grows. Also, I was surprised with my BNs when they ate brown algae. I thought they only ate green? Because my old one only ate green but wouldn't touch brown?

But I'm not complaining

Because one is busy ate work cleaning out my 70 gallon Tropheus cichlid tank. Since it is small, it is able to reach the places between the rockwork where I couldn't reach.

apistomaster · Post by **apistomaster** » 05 Jun 2007, 01:19

Culturing greenwater and growing sessile algae are two different projects.

In this case you wish to grow sessile algae. I have found that placing sections of white fluorescent eggcrate light diffusing material in a well lighted container filled with aquarium water provides quite a bit of available substrate suface area. It also produces areas of greater degrees of difficult acess so the fish have to work at getting to all of it.
Once the algae has become established you can rotate pieces from culture tank to feeding and back. The recycled pieces will retain enough algae that regrowth will be more rapid than the initial startup growth was.

With so many prepared algae based foods available I'm not sure how useful growing extra algae really is.

aquaholic · Post by **aquaholic** » 07 Jun 2007, 18:08

Just feed some commercial algae wafers if you want to feed algae. Alternatively you could soak some spirulina or algae based flake and then sun dry onto some rocks.

If your hellbent on growing algae I used to culture green algae on hardwood sticks. I had about 60 pieces approx 2.5cm x 2.5cm x 25cm long (garden stakes will do). I drilled a hole at one end and inserted a wire hook made out of coathanger wire. Then I used clear plastic 2L plastic bottles with the tops cut off so they were wide open. Suspend the wooden pieces into aged (non chlorine) water and add a good pinch of liquid fertiliser and place bottles in direct sun. These water cultures should go bright green quickly and fresh green algae growth will shortly appear. I used 10 bottles in a rotation system and harvested almost daily. If it takes you longer to culture algae then add more bottles.... The sun is really strong here in Australia :) To harvest I simply removed the wood, used the hook to hang them into the tanks and then recharged the bottle... new water, new fertiliser and reused the algae eaten sticks.

You can email me direct if you need further queries.
I only used this to feed some fussy/small suckermouths that didnt like algae wafers.