Damn BGA!

[cks]

By the way, I respectfully request that you use the shift key in your keyboard to capitalise your sentences. We have a regular here who's partly dyslexic. Debra Bear is one of our greatest supporters so we don't want her to have difficulties reading the posts here. I hope you understand what we are trying to do in Killies.com. Thank you.

KL ,
Sorry about it .
Not intentional.
Cheers
Dennis

[FC]

If you do have the knowledge, then treat long enough to fully kill all the potentially harmful organisms, and not just to reduce the BGA. [That full treatment is often 10 days to 2 weeks at full strength.]

Wright,
Correct me if I am wrong.
I think there is a different bewteen treating a human/animals where the bacterias are embeded in our body cells. For that, what you suggested would normally be required.
Treating the BGA in water is a much more direct attack on the target (bacteria) and therefore, a much shorter time is suffice.
I have BGA once (or twice?) and anti-biotic kill them quick and good without any effect at all on other living things in the tank, plants and fishes. It is a proven method. Of course, the dosage is important.
Or are you saying, the fishes which are exposed to the anti-biotic at the same time and therefore required the said period to complete the course?

Dennis,
Thank you for sharing your practical experiences, we apprecaite it.
As you probably aware, in this Killies.com forum, we are different animals , we are little more serious like many people said. Do not take it to heart, like Wright, we meant to complement.
Hope to see (as of postings) you more often here.

Peter,
I doubt very much blackout would affect the BGA wellbeing. They do not rely on photosyntesis to produce food/carbo. Like Dennis, I have tried that without success before I took the pills (no, no, not for me. The the the tank ).
BTW, thank you and good to see you here :wink: .

[PeterGwee]

Freddy, I never had BGA for all the years of keeping plants so I cannot give you the assurance it will work but folks in APD and Tom Barr the plant guru say that it works. What do you think?

Here's an extract from Tom Barr's reply to a person having BGA problems in APD.

Cyanobacteria and most very small algae are much better suited to high DOC
and low nutrients. They can also appear in very eutrophic waters and are a
big issue for lakes/ponds. They can cause problems in marine systems as
well, killing corals etc. These systems sometimes get destabilized becuase
there are so much nutrient inputs into the environment that it pushes
normal ecological states/stabilities out of range.

For our tanks, it appears as a result of high DOC with very low NO3.
The genus that infest our tanks is Oscillitoria andf it is a filamentous
non heterocyst forming species, therefore it does not fix atmospheric
nitrogen, since heterocycst are require in this genus at least, to fix N2.

I have looked at about 15 smaples from all over the world, every sample had
this same genus.
One sample had some Phorimidium(pretty nasty tank issue).

Adding KNO3 to about 10ppm, doing large water changes weekly prevent it
from ocurring.

To get rid of it, it is very simple and effective method:

Remove all you can FIRST
Then do a 50% water change
Turn off the lights
Turn off the CO2
Cover tank with trash bags/blankets etc
Add 1/4 teaspoon KNO3 per 20 gal of tank

Wait 3 days(Antibiotics take 5 days BTW and cost $, this is free)

Remove bags, the tank should be algae free.
Do water change, add same amount of KNO3 back, continue to dose KNO3
thereafter more frequently if you were adding it before and do large water
changes.

Done.

There are several main orders in Cyanophyta.

I will defer to this iste:
http://koning.ecsu.ctstateu.edu/plan...yanophyta.html

Regards,
Tom Barr

Regards
Peter Gwee :wink:

[TyroneGenade]

I have only had serious problems with BGA when I have tried to interfer with it. In general I just leave it alone, reduce feeding and then it vanishes over time.

At one stage one of my tanks sand substrate was litrally coverred with BGA. In the space of a week it had all vanished. In my 1.2m planted tank back in SA BGA samples put into the tank vanished the same day.

I'm no expert but my advise is simply:
1) leave it alone. It will grow fast, exhaust is nutrients and then die.
2) reduce fish feeding so to quicker exhaust its nutrients.
3) leave the lights on so the plants can better compete with the BGA for nutrients. Add some KNO4 because K+ (potassium) is what the plants need not the NO4- which they don't really like... they want NH3/NH4+ as nitrogen source. Algae and BGA are also more efficient uses of light and can survive at low light levels happily.
4) add some shell grit to the tank to increase the redox potential of the water. BGA don't seem to like that at all. Tanks with old oyster or abalone shells never get infested from my experience.
5) generally pamper the higher plants who are far more efficient uses of nutrients.

Good luck (you will need it)

[hobbit6003]

Just an update on my BGA situation:

What I did after hearing all the advises dispensed here, was that I decided to point my rainbar outlet blowing obliquely downwards, so that there's some current getting down to the tenellus lawn.

At the same time, I carried on with my manual evacuation of tiny BGA spots every few days, nothing more. I also reduced the amount of incidental rays from the sunlight to fall on the tank, by pulling my window curtains down.

After more than a week, the BGA spots have actually been cut down significantly, and I no longer need to remove them every 2-3 days. Thus, I hope this continues and eventually help me eradicate this pest forever, and avert a potential disaster.

Cheers,

Kenny