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Maintaining Green Water



        Some people have expressed difficulties in keeping green water
going. I have maintained a green water culture in a twenty gallon tank for
months now, using some of it once in awhile to feed my Daphnia cultures.  I
came accross the successful method purely by laziness and the need for tank
space.  Someone gave me some silver molly babies, and not having anyplace
to put them, I dumped them in an empty 20 gallon, threw in some aged water
from various tanks, then left them alone.  No heating, no filtration, no
airstone.  They thrived, but so did the green water.  So thick at times
that you could hardly see the fish.  As they got bigger, I took pity on
them swimming in their pea soup, so I put in a sponge filter.  Slowly but
surely, crash, no green water.  Still have happy mollies though.
        A second tank had been put up, and also had a nice bloom of algae.
I use it to dump in my little rainbows, mollies, killies, whatever.  Just
so the babies are small.  Again, no air, no filtration.  The babies love
it, the water has been green for months.  My speculation is that the babies
graze on the daphnia and other green crashing organisms before they have a
chance to clean up the water.  I feed baby brine into the tank daily, and
maintain a healthy crop of snails.  Once in awhile I siphon the gunk off
the bottom to clean things up a bit.  Other than that, nothing.
        The tank is 11 inches from a two bulb shoplight that gets old bulbs
from my reef tank before throw away.  The light is over only half of the
tank, and is on a timer for on 17 hours a day.  Works for me.
                                  George Davis - Wilmington, Delaware