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Re: Staghorn algae



I don't think there's anything that eats the stuff, but I did notice that 
it's disappeared from one of my tanks that had it pretty bad. This is 
really just a wild guess, but I think once the plants grew in and started 
filling out the tank more, the staghorn eventually got starved into 
oblivion. I've noticed this happening (to different degrees) to a variety 
of algae. I have this stuff in another tank that looks like dark green shag 
carpet growing on the Flourite and a little bit on a piece of driftwood. In 
the past, if I tried to manually remove it, I'd end up picking up a lot of 
Flourite with the carpet. Recently, however, I've noticed some of it 
releasing and lifting up from the substrate and I can just pick it out. I 
had massive thread algae in the tank with the staghorn, and just noticed 
this minute that it's almost all gone, too. Okay - if anything *ate* it, 
I'd have to say it was the Caridina japonica (Japanese marsh shrimp). But 
I'm almost certain that I saw the staghorn receding before I added the shrimp.

If you provide conditions that foster good plant growth, most algae will be 
starved. It certainly helps to have algae-eating fauna in the tank, but 
your first and best line of defense is going to be strong, happy planties. 
Believe you me, I haven't reached "Nirvana tank" by any stretch of the 
imagination; I totally rely on my "cleaning crew" to do most of my dirty 
work. But my thumb is slowly getting greener, and maybe in the next year, 
I'll have a sure answer as to how I actually got the staghorn to disappear. ;-)

-Naomi