red vein stuff on my rocks..

[dnejdl]

my tank is 3 yrs old and i have this stuff all over my rocks my water is great with all the right things but this stuff is over growing my rock how due i stop it !!! i tryied scrubing it and that dont work, i hate to think i have to tear it down and let the rock dry out to kill it .... has this happen to anybody else please help.. thxs.:cry:

 

[martinreefer]

Looks like Gelidium to me. It can be a big pain. I had really great success with small emerald crabs. They do a good job with cleaning it up.

Aaron

 

[bangoo]

I've had the same thing happen. They are very tough to scrape off. I think they are called red turf algae?? What I did was I bought some big turbo snails and placed them directly on top of turf algae, and they seemed to get rid of it. I did get rid of one of the rock which had too much growth (the red stuff was still on the rock dried out even after being out for 5-6 months). I also hear that tuxedo urchin could do the job. Good luck.

 

[dnejdl]

yes the urchin due an asome job !!! but i would need 50 of them in my 220 .. lol.

 

[dnejdl]

ill order 12 emerald crabs today as see if that will help...

 

[ashton]

I had that stuff and it was a major PAIN. The only thing i had success with was turbo snails.

 

[dnejdl]

the bad thing about turbos are they nock everything over , lol.

 

[ashton]

yes they do lol. Luckily i was able to get some that were on the smaller side and as long as things were glued or secured they didnt knock it over.

 

[dnejdl]

so did they clean everything up ?

 

[ashton]

no they didnt clean everything up because it had gotten pretty bad before i added them. They have started to thin it out in some areas but i am actually in the process now of upgrading to a larger tank and am doing all new live rock and cleaning all frag plugs and corals before moving into the new tank. Luckily the new tank is in a different location so I can have my other tank running at the same time while I slowly clean and move everything over.

 

[jcom]

It is Gelidium for sure and I have the same thing going on right now. Was in a few spots here and there for quite awhile, then in the last 60 days it exploded! Mexican Turbos! I bought 15 and they are eating and ******** it out like there's no tomorrow. They have put the serious hurt on in and have knocked it down by about 30 percent in the last 10 days. I also put a GFO reactor on my system to give it the 1 - 2 punch.

I read every post I could find on it and everyone ultimately ends up having success from Mexican Turbos. FWIW, I heard that the Belize Zebra Turbos won't eat it.

 

[jcom]

no they didnt clean everything up because it had gotten pretty bad before i added them. They have started to thin it out in some areas but i am actually in the process now of upgrading to a larger tank and am doing all new live rock and cleaning all frag plugs and corals before moving into the new tank. Luckily the new tank is in a different location so I can have my other tank running at the same time while I slowly clean and move everything over.

Sadly, I don't think you can ever rid your system of this crap. I'm sure it will always be lurking in the cracks somewhere waiting for a comeback. But I'm pretty confident these Mex Turbos are going to knock it down to just about nothing (they are relentless on it and seem to crave it...they are working all the edges of my corals, inlets, etc). But I'll probably have to keep 2 - 3 of the 15 I have in there for the rest of this tank's life. If I upgrade in the future, I too will be starting from scratch. All of my astrea snails are little, moving gelidium xmas trees : ( I'll probably pull them out one by one and carefully squirt their shells with vinegar. Vinegar wipes it out completely (soaked my Vortechs in it for 20 mins and it killed it all)