Reef nutrition

Crazy green film algae overtaking refugium

Look at this nastiness. It’s smothering my refugium and killing my macro algae. Is it due to a lack of surface skimming maybe?
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I have been. But it’s taking over. It’s like a mix of slime and hair algae.

I removed the black screen baffle and went back to the stock configuration. Cleaned most of it out tonight as well. We will see if if coms back. It definitely looks to have more surface agitation now.
 
One of the healthiest refugiums I've seen many years ago, had a thick layer of green spongy looking macro along with chaeto and caulerpa; I can't recall who's fishtank system it was but it was full of life in the refugium.
 
One of the healthiest refugiums I've seen many years ago, had a thick layer of green spongy looking macro along with chaeto and caulerpa; I can't recall who's fishtank system it was but it was full of life in the refugium.

That would be ideal. But it started choking out my macro algae.

I think my modified version I did yesterday will work. I’ll snap a pic later.


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I had the same thing happen to my refugium and it was hair algae, choking the plants and growing in a mat on the surface. I had to scrape everything out of the refugium and start over with a bunch of clean new macroalgae. I also found that once I had a lot of acros, chaeto stopped growing and would get icky, but ulva does ok.

Once something tips the balance toward hair algae or other of the nasties, it’s hard to fix without a total re-do.
 
No carbon dosing at all.


Not everything has died. I have a little of everything except the red gracilaria left. The red gracilaria died.

I stopped the choking before it all died. I’m left with just a softball size chunk of chaeto. Was basketball sized.
 
If you still have a good chunk of chaeto that isn’t overtaken by the nuisance algae you can use it, but give it a leg up by clearing out all that other algae.
 
That white tube is fed off my return pump. So it’s got plenty of flow.

I thought that was the problem a while back and did that.


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The fact that your surface is skumming over leads me to believe your overflow weirs aren't operating as intended. I've seen that in the past when things start to clog due to macro clogging the overflow.
 
That’s what I thought so I removed the weirs and went with just a straight piece of glass.

I run filter floss in between my bubble trap, so I need to make sure that doesn’t get clogged.
 
I suppose it’s worth a shot to start over new but if you can’t find the reason it started then you may just be back at the same point you are now.
 
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