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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