bubble algae problem

so my refugium has been running for about 2 months now and i have alot of bubble algae that has been forming throughout the refuguim section...

how do i stop the growing and or make whats in there die off??


here is a few pics of it.

 

get an emerald crab. theyre supposed to eat the stuff. otherwise, its gonna be very tedious to try and get all that bubble algae off manually. and bein careful not to pop them and send their spores throughout your tank.

 

i put one of my emerald crabs inside the fuge and he didnt seem to clean it up much..

any other ideas? what do they feed off of? nitrates?

 

put a very large emerald crab in there but dont put him in your dt i had a issue with the larger ones eating coral

 

I found that persistence is the key with bubble algae. I would manually remove it with tweezers/tongs (trying not to pop the bubbles), had emerald crabs, etc. One day, my son and I were doing a major cleaning and found that our overflow box was covered in bubble algae, which just probably kept it spreading through the tank! I even found it inside some of my power heads! It was driving my crazy. I just kept after it and found it less and less. It's been a while since I've had to remove any and I'm glad - I guess persistence pays off.

 

yea i totally have realized the nuisance of them over the last few weeks but i found a solution, bubble algae hates current so what i did was removed my liverock from the fuge and lowered the water level of my fuge making more current pass over the algae aswell as not feeding as much as i normally do and it started to die off, now there is only a few clusters left, thanks for the info guys.



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Is this a slow moving or fast moving refugium?

No one should be concerned with what is growing in their refugium. You added a refugium to resolve the issue of algae growing in your display tank right? Now you grow bubble algae in the refugium and you want to remove it – this is what your designed it to do.

I rarely inspect my refugium, just from time to time if I think I need to trim. It’s a swamp that needs to be left to its own devises, if those devises are cyano and bubble algae – fantastic. The refugium should (and needs) to be untouched in order to do its thing – getting in there and poking around will disturb the process and hinder its ability to protect your tank.