Algae ID

[genes]

I am confused, which is staghorn and which is hair algae? Or are they different variants of hair algae?

This one is brittle and breaks off easily, takes over foreground lawn and pockets of spaces between plants. I assume its staghorn?


This one is soft and can grow long. Grows only between plants and never found on the foreground lawn. I assume this is hair algae?

[valice]

First one does look like staghorn to me...

[wasabi8888]

I always get confused as well.. damn upsetting... what is also important is how to solve both.. is it the same resolution? ie stable co2, low bioload etc...

[grey_fox]

First photo is stag horn. Second is hair algae.

I had stag horn before in my previous setup and what I did to solve it was to firstly do a thorough manual clean-up large weekly water changes and also to stabilise the CO2, slowly but surely, the staghorn started to disappear.

CO2 is probably one of the bigger factors. When my CO2 tank dried up and I forgotten to replace it for over a week plus, the staghorn came back.

Haven't dealt much with hair algae but probably the same process.

[Puffer]

I've got both previously and what i did was threw in many yamatos and i don't see any now. I had about 20+ adult yamatos in this 3 ft tank. However, this also coincided with me adding in a rainbar to allow better current flow for co2 to circulate within the tank. I did witness yamatos pulling up strings of the algae in the foreground though.