- Solutions: Practice good aquarium maintenance care routines! This includes keeping the substrate clean, cutting back on feedings, regularly rinsing, rejuvenating or changing any type of prefilerting or absorbing materials (such as filter flosses, cartridges, bio wheels, sponges and carbon), performing regular partial water changes, and for DOCs in particular, adding a protein skimmer protein skimmer ( read reviews & compare prices). For those with systems that have been running for some time and use wet/dry trickle type filters, the bio media in them, especially bio balls, are real nitrate factories, and therefore should carefully be rinsed and cleaned periodically.
- Add some good diatom eating Trochus and Astraea snails, a fish, such as a Kole Tang, Potter's or Flame Angelfish, and to help keep the aquarium bottom clean and tidy, some algae/detritus eating hermit crabs, a tank friendly true crab, shrimp, or other type of tank janitors. Of course you DON'T want to add ALL of these critters, just choose on or two of these options. In our photos, the clear or white looking patchy area at the bottom of the diatom algae is from where a small true crab in our tank ate the algae off the glass that it could reach.
- When adding live rock, take the time to cure it properly.
- Important Note: If your tank is still cycling, DO NOT add any new animals, do ANY water changes, or perform ANY MAJOR substrate or filter cleaning tasks, other than to change dirty prefiltering materials and/or to QUICK siphon stuff off the bottom, until the tank has COMPLETELY FINISHED cycling. The unsightly brown algae can easily be removed temporarily from the walls of the aquarium by using an algae scraper, sponge or magnet, and scrubbed off the substrate and rocks with a toothbrush, where it can then be removed from the water through mechanical filtration, such as by adding a hang-on-tank canister filter (read product reviews and compare prices), and larger floating pieces can be removed with a net, turkey baster, or by light siphoning.
- Carbon Dioxide (CO2): Low water flow or movement throughout the aquarium produces carbon dioxide (CO2), which algae consume.
- Solutions: Depending on the size of the aquarium add a powerhead or two (read reviews & compare prices), install a wavemaker or surge device (read reviews & compare prices), and/or increase the flow rate or efficiency of the filtration system.
- Looking at our enlarged photos, you can clearly see two areas in the tank where the algae first began growing and spread out from there, next to the powerhead and next to where the Magnum 350 canister filter intake and output are positioned. These are two spots where the least amount of water movement occurs. Solutions for this situation are to add another powerhead at the opposite end of the tank from where the present powerhead is located, or periodically reposition or move the powerhead itself or rotate the output nozzle to point in a different direction from time to time.
One final interesting note is that because diatoms "consume" nitrates, often when aquarists perform nitrate tests, the readings come up as normal. Don't be deceived. If you were to remove the diatom algae temporarily before putting into action any of the above solutions, in all likelihood you will see a rise in the nitrate levels in the aquarium. It's like a catch 22. The nitrates have actually been there all along, but unreadable as the algae is feeding on it, therefore the nitrates "appear" to be in check. This applies to many other forms of algae as well!
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