recently i bought some black substrate for my aquarium. its gery glossy and looks fantastic. its made of glass, but isnt too sharp. i can get a handful and squeeze as hard as i can without worrying about it. if i tried i could probably use a piece to cut myself if i applied enough pressure, but the same is true of my liverock, so im not really worried about that, the problem is something i didnt expect. algae.
ive been without an octopus for a few months now (finding it impossible to get one where i live without looking myself, which ill start doing pretty soon), so to keep my tank going ive just been throwing in some dead shrimp of decent size. it seems to work well and never produced enough ammonia to harm my starfish or hermit crab. however in the last couple of weeks i got some decent sized domino damselfish and a couple of clownfish. i have a few tanks set up to one system so nothing can harm anything else, but after doing that and changing the substrate i seem to have a huge algae boom. the new substrate, being glass, also seems to have noticable amount growing on it. could this boom be becuase of the fish? even though the tank has been going all this time could they have pushed it over the edge? my set up is a 6x2x2, a 4x2x2 and a 3x1.5x1.5 by the way. it wasnt long ago that i finally got around to clearing most of the algae off the glass, but that was before i changed substrate. could that have something to do with it?
its frustrating becuase i just started really making an effort to make my tank look good, even without any large and impressive animals, and now it seems like im going to have to make alot more effort in keeping this under control. my very nice looking (and very expensive) substrate is starting to look like a very light green snow has fallen on it. any advice?
ive been without an octopus for a few months now (finding it impossible to get one where i live without looking myself, which ill start doing pretty soon), so to keep my tank going ive just been throwing in some dead shrimp of decent size. it seems to work well and never produced enough ammonia to harm my starfish or hermit crab. however in the last couple of weeks i got some decent sized domino damselfish and a couple of clownfish. i have a few tanks set up to one system so nothing can harm anything else, but after doing that and changing the substrate i seem to have a huge algae boom. the new substrate, being glass, also seems to have noticable amount growing on it. could this boom be becuase of the fish? even though the tank has been going all this time could they have pushed it over the edge? my set up is a 6x2x2, a 4x2x2 and a 3x1.5x1.5 by the way. it wasnt long ago that i finally got around to clearing most of the algae off the glass, but that was before i changed substrate. could that have something to do with it?
its frustrating becuase i just started really making an effort to make my tank look good, even without any large and impressive animals, and now it seems like im going to have to make alot more effort in keeping this under control. my very nice looking (and very expensive) substrate is starting to look like a very light green snow has fallen on it. any advice?