Algae inverse with disturbance?

To: Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com
Subject: Algae inverse with disturbance?
From: cbay at actwin_com (Charlie Bay)
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 08:18:43 -0700 (MST)
In-Reply-To: <199602190839.DAA32099 at looney_actwin.com> from "Aquatic-Plants-Owner at ActWin_com" at Feb 19, 96 03:39:03 am

Gee whiz, there are a lot of people on this list!  :-)

I have an algal observation, and I am looking for additional
perspectives.

I make the educated guess that algae growth decreases when
water current increases.  In other words, algae development
holds an inverse relationship with water movement.

While clearly light, nutrients, predators, etc. must absolutely
play a role, I have far fewer algae problems in those tanks
with (significant) water movement, while tanks with little or 
no disturbance seem to have occasional outbreaks (blue-green
algae, hair algae, other).

I can rationalize why this might be so:

  o Water movement better circulates water nutrients to
    vascular plants, which can more efficiently extract
		these nutrients (higher competition overall against 
		algae from lower nutrient availability).

  o Water movement increases the uniformity in the
	   aquarium, removing micro-climates that may marginally
		benefit algae over vascular plants.

  o Water movement might interfere with some part of the
	   development cycle for algae species that must attach
		to a surface.  

Of course, many of these points have already been made in
this group in support of providing water movement in our
aquariums.  The question becomes this:  Is the correlation strong 
enough that we can consider water movement a possible tactic 
in favor of algae eradication? Has anyone on this list _ever_ 
seen blue-green algae in a tank with significant water movement? 

What do the rest of you think?  How does this compare with
your observations?

--charley
cbay at jeppesen_com             Fort Collins, Colorado USA