BBA Horror-Just to share my experience.

[Fei Miao]

[quote:9b8fa18c7a="pompom"]

wat BBA stands for bro??

Yeahh.... wat is BBA? [/quote:9b8fa18c7a]

BIG BAD ALGAE! go away!!!

BAD BAD ALIEN! go away too!!!

BLACK BRUSH ALGAE! we don't want you!!

BLUE BEARD ALIEN! ARRR....

take your pick


I finally did something drastic,--

Rip and redo my glosso lawn, suction off as much dirt or whatever left.. trimmed off anything that gives me any inclination of turning to be BBA, inject Hydrogen Peroxide into the gravel (...and see fireworks in the tank man!), ....replant glosso, lay a layer of new gravel ( thanks to vic for the kind donation) ... and hope for the best!

[PeterGwee]

Feimao, please refrain from confusing newbies.
BBA stands for black brush algae...

The following pictures are taken from Ghazanfar Ghori's wonderful website..



Regards
Peter Gwee

[pompom]

YUCK !!!!

How come the 1st pic different to the 2nd one?
The 1st one is white? arent they still the same BBA?

[albert]

Hi,

Seen you guys been mentioning Hydrogen Peroxide. My HC has been infested with BBA. Wanted to give it a try. Any advice?

btw, where can I find/buy Hydrogen Peroxide?

Thanks

Albert

[tawauboy]

you can get hydrogen peroxide from pharmacies. off the shelf. it's a 3% solution.
use with care as hydrogen peroxide is a powerful oxidiser. use a syringe to apply directly to bba. think the limit is 15ml for every 10 gallons. after after hydrogen peroxide treatment, your tank will be like a fizz tank. change water after about an hour.

soft leaved plants like riccia and app will get 'burn'.

[victri]

[quote:211b5d5a69="albert"]Hi,

Seen you guys been mentioning Hydrogen Peroxide. My HC has been infested with BBA. Wanted to give it a try. Any advice?

btw, where can I find/buy Hydrogen Peroxide?

Thanks

Albert[/quote:211b5d5a69]

You can get it from any pharmacy pretty cheap. Just look for the shelf where they keep stuff like antisceptic and plasters (Band-Aid). Be very careful when you apply it directly to plants. It's a very good quick-kill method, but do remember that you still need to balance your nutrients/lights/CO2 etc to keep it away in the long term.

[loupgarou]

actually only guardian pharmacy (and certain branches) carry it
its usually located near the syringes..

[albert]

Thanks for the advices. Will give a shot to it!

Albert

[PeterGwee]

A basic issue of low CO2 and yet you are resorting to drastic measures? Come on, get it over with by trimming and scrubbing the tank real well. Then increase your CO2 and try to get it stable in the range of 20-30ppm. Try to error on the higher side..you would not kill inhibitants with that and it takes a pretty heavy dose to do that though. (This applies to folks doing CO2 injection only when the lights are "on" as the danger of overdosing is pretty real when you do 24/7 though.)

Regards
Peter Gwee

[anaconda]

Wouldnt that mean an easier way to kill off the algae would be to just jack up the CO2 level to 25-35 ppm and stop dosing nutrients for a while?

[victri]

Hi,

I need to remind you guys (especially newbies) that hydrogen peroxide is not a miracle potion. It's NOT a permanent solution. It's more for those who have worked on balancing their CO2, lights and nutrients, and finally want to get rid of those last few remaining spots of algae quickly. If your tank is not well balanced, any algae you just got rid of will return in a matter of days/weeks. You'll kill your plants if you repeat the peroxide treatments too many times.

anaconda:
I wouldn't stop dosing nutrients if pumping up the CO2 as that's when the plants will be using/needing more nutrients. You need to find the right mixture/combination by observing your plants.

[Plantbrain]

Word of warning: do not over do it with peroxide, it can and has killed folk's fish that got a little crazy with it.

I've always trimmed it all off, thern cranked the CO2/nuterients and had the new growth come back in.
Sometimes there's much less plant mass after the "hacking", so I'll add some water sprite, coon tail etc till the other plants grow back in.

But generally:
Remove the algae that's there, all you possibily can, prune, trim, clean filter.
After all that, then do the water change, dose and correct conditions, namely CO2 and add some NO3.

It does not come back if you do this, even without SAE's, which are good to add if you are worried, but these are not needed, but will help.

FYI: you cannot kill BBAS through limiting the nutrients, the plants stop growing and the algae don't. Then the plants become great substrates for algae to grow on. We tried limiting PO4 and NO3(0.0ppm with Lamott kits). It still grew well.

Sometimes the right combo of CO2 and light etc seem to kill some cases of it, but this rare.

Oh yea, if the tank is a Crypt tank, copper sulfate to about .25ppm or higher even will kill it. Cypts seem to do very well at high Cu levels. Bob Gasser use to grow them at very high Cu levels.
Algae free too

Regards,
Tom Barr

[loupgarou]

unfortunately it seems corydoras are sensitive to copper, so I can't really do that.

seachem has a copper substitute, does it work as well?
http://www.seachem.com/en_products/p...cupramine.html

anyway, algae pictures to come up.


http://www.tdsuo.com/gallery/list.ph...c&lang=eng






Now, if anyone thinks co2 can kill this, feel free to adopt some from me..

currently,
Tank PH with no co2 (outgassed) = 7.1
Tank GH = 5
Tank KH = 3
PH with CO2 controller on = 6.2

technically this ought to give me co2 of 56.8ppm which should have killed all my fish technically.

[/img]

[PeterGwee]

CO2 does not kill the BBA...it just prevents it from growing thats all. You need to remove those BBA and then watch your CO2 well. It should not come back at all.

Chris, why don't you take a small sample of your tank water and aerate it. Find the highest possible pH you can attain by aerating the sample. Aim for a pH drop of 1.6-1.7 from the highest pH of the aerated sample should give you an approximate value of 20-30ppm of CO2. Does the required pH falls lower than 6.2 that you are now using? If it does, you probably have some non-carbonate buffer in your tank or your probe is screwed.

Regards
Peter Gwee

[Fei Miao]

didn't mean to mislead anyone :P please correct me if I'm wrong...

.. as in my other post; hyrodgen peroxide must be use with caution, I always do a waterchange after.

...you need to remove as much BBA manually as possible, in my case I decided to remove all and redo the lawn, in a way I want to have a even new growth for the glosso as well.

After glosso is removed and all the remaining debris/dirt/spot algae on the glass and bottom scrubbed and suctioned off. Hyrodgen peroxide is applied into the top layer of gravel to removed any remaining BBA It is not a miracle solution(for the lack of word)...it just a part of the solution I used in eliminating the algae.

A correct balance of CO2, light and nutrients is absolutely necessary to get the tank back on track of recovery.

[victri]

Hi loupgarou,

I have the same problem as you. My water is measured at 6.4pH @ 4dKH. That'll give me 47.8ppm of CO2 if I follow the chart. Something's screwing with our water. Till I find out what it is, the method that Peter described for keeping a pH difference of 1.6-1.7 seems to work fine for me.

Maintaining the proper range of CO2 along with good fert dosing has kept BBA away from my tank for the last couple weeks. Of course you still need to break your back picking out all the existing BBA.

[loupgarou]

I think i already stated:
ph with co2 outgassed is 7.1
ph with co2 is 6.2

this is a drop of 0.9,

I will try to drop it to 5.5 (1.6ph difference) but I'll do it 1 ph at a time then.

take note that 5.5 with kh 3 = 285 ppm of co2, which is likely to be toxic..
is there fish insurance out there

believe me, I trim my crypts until botak but the bba still grows back.

its probable my bba is bba sp 'kudzu'

as for Peroxide,
I was changing from my 4ft to my current 5ft, I was dosing the last remaining 5cm of water in the 4dt tank with an entire bottle of peroxide to nuke the remaining bba, but there were some malayan shrimp and one kuhli loach which was hiding still. 1/2 hour later, they were still alive, but the tank was bubbling like champagne..

kuhli loach (the only one) is still alive in my 5ft tank..

[victri]

The pH difference I'm maintaining is about 1.4-1.6 since my tankwater (left overnight) is about 7.8pH and 6.2-6.4pH while CO2 is running. I use coral chips to maintain at 4-5dKH. I try to keep pH above 6 to avoid rotting the tailfins of my fancy guppies.

Tapwater is about 7.6pH in my area. How's yours? If something in your tank has lowered your water's pH, the CO2 chart wouldn't really apply, as is the case for those people using ADA soil. Perhaps you could try increasing the dKH of your water so you end up with higher pH and don't need to go all the way down to 5.5.

IMO, CO2 is just the first step, but I think that my recent obsession with righting my nutrient dosing (especially N and P) nailed the coffin on BBA.

[theodore]

[quote:a897e99f7d="loupgarou"]believe me, I trim my crypts until botak but the bba still grows back.
[/quote:a897e99f7d]

Maybe there is a limiting nutrient? I got my 1st BBA outbreak due to low P. That's when I realise the drop in PO4 levels can exceed 3ppm per week when the plants in that tank get densely packed enough.

[loupgarou]

yeah, there may be a limiting nutrient, I upped my seachem fluorish dosage according to the new dosage instructions today.

I dropped ph to 6.28 on the controller today.

ph in my tap water is 6.9 to 7.2, kh = 0 , the alkalinity is probably due to chloramine content.

in anycase, I think I better reset the tank over the long weekend.

going to fish out all the critters, uproot all the plants. going to peroxide the tank and the crypts. I'll trim back the star grass and replant the uninfected plants.

maybe pp bomb the tank while its denizen free as well.