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Re: Brown Alge	Wright Huntley
	Mar 22, 2000 07:02 PST

r-lee wrote: Hi everyone: My question is this has anyone conquered the dreaded brown alge. I have a lot of bare tanks with sponge filters with pairs of angelfish one pair per 20 gal tank. I do weekly water changes of 25 to 50 present I wipe down side walls & bottom every 2 weeks to get rid of brown alge. Lights are on 8 to 12 hours a day. any ideas on how to discourage the stuff .       Lee If you feed the fish, and have no live plants to utilize their wastes, live with it. [BTW, "brown algae" is usually diatomes and not really algae.] IMHO, bare tanks are a *really* bad idea for almost any fish. Plants absorb ammonia and deliver copious amounts of oxygen. At times I may have as many as 150 tanks going, and the ones where I lose fish unexpectedly are invariable among the very few with little or no plants. I realize the notion of bare tanks got popular among a few cichlid breeders back in the 50s and 60s, but now only under the necessities of a large commercial operation are they excusable (with what we have learned since). If you don't want to deal with a good substrate, at least use Java moss, Java fern and Anubias. They can be tied to driftwood and easily lifted out for cleaning or moving to another tank. None of those require strong lighting. <Flame shield going up> Wright -- Wright Huntley, Fremont CA, USA, 510 494-8679 huntleyone at home dot com          "DEMOCRACY" is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.      "LIBERTY" is a well-armed lamb denying enforcement of the vote.              *** http://www.self-gov.org/index.html ***

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