Aquarium Madness

I’ve been battling some red algae issue in my 75 gallon salt water tank recently. I’m thinking of removing a large portion of the live rock from my tank.

The main reasoning for doing this is that I figure the live rock is the one part of the tank that I have a hard time cleaning or keeping clean. I can’t seem to get any of my bottom feeding critters to do much with the red algae. The bottom feeders eat everything in the tank but the one thing that I do not want to have in the tank.

Pulling the live rock from the tank would allow me to completely clean the substrate over the course of a couple weeks. I’d clean the substrate slowly. I might just pull maybe 80% of my live rock only. That way I can keep a few pieces in the the tank for fish to hide around. It’d also be easier to maintain.

I just don’t want to stress the fish too much.

I’ve just looked into my dark tank (the lights are off) and there are three snails swarming on the Halloween Hermit Crab’s shell.

I just noticed that the Halloween Hermit Crab had gone into hiding earlier. I am under the impression that this hermit crab is molting at the moment. I figure if the hermit crab is molting, the snail probably can’t get to it because of it’s shell.

Killer Snails

Could the snails possibly have gotten the Blue Knuckle Hermit Crab? I hope not. But they may have. This is some interesting behavior within my tank right now.

All this stuff just creates more questions about the happenings inside my tank. I don’t get any answers. It’s kinda like watching Lost.

I’ve recently begun an all out attack against algae in my 75 gallon saltwater aquarium. I am now vacuuming gravel and changing water at the rate of about 5 gallons of water per night.

I think this will be good for the long haul. My fish are looking very healthy. The water is clear. The filtration doesn’t need to be cleaned as much, it seems.

I just need to do whatever I need to do to starve the red slime algae into oblivion. At the same time, I don’t want to change the water in one motion so drastically as to stress the fish and other inhabitants of the aquarium.

Oh well. I’ll keep at. 5 gallons per night average.

Recently I have been battling a bout of red algae in my tank. I’m pretty sure that it is just due to a combination of many things. I have ramped up the following maintenance tasks to try to alleviate this red algae attack:

• Water changes with gravel vacuuming once a night. 5 gallons of water swapped out of 75 gallons total. I hit a small portion of the gravel each night and vacuum thoroughly.
• Frequent filter changes and cleaning. I am thinking I need to replace my cannister filtration, or at least upgrade it. More on that later.
• Frequent glass cleaning. I’m thinking if I keep algae from growing on the aquarium glass, that’s one less issue that contributes.

I’m going to put on the full attack to rid my tank of this annoying red slime algae.