Why Cutting Light To Reduce Hair Algae Won't Help.
I put Green hair algae in a totally light proof container without water for almost 60 days and the GHA is alive and well.
This happened by accident. When I shut my tank down for refurbishment, I put all the codium fragile macro from my sump into a black food grade container I have with tank water. There was some GHA (green hair algae) growing on my macro and I intended to deal with it later. Unfortunately one of the kids knocked over the container, spilling almost all the water and algae on my lounge room floor. So I stuffed it back in the container and put the lid on it - yeah, shutting the stable gate after the horse has bolted.
I asked my son to put the container outside while I cleaned the carpet with my wet/dry vax. I then completely forgot about it until I stumbled into it today, roughly 50+ days later. This container is 5mm thick lightproof high grade plastic, originally used to store chemicals used in milk processing. The chemical rapidly degrades in light and the containers are made accordingly, even the lids are really hard to get on and off.
Well stuff me. There was about 1cm of moisture in the bottom and pretty much dead macro to about half way up the container. But the GHA was still bright green. I put it in a bucket of fresh water and that shit is alive and well. I'll duplicate the experiment with photos as a future reference but I think it's safe to say that cutting down light in your average aquarium, isn't going to reduce GHA one little bit. Given that we've also had really cold temperatures here (including light snow) I reckon temperature isn't much of an issue for GHA either.
:eek
This happened by accident. When I shut my tank down for refurbishment, I put all the codium fragile macro from my sump into a black food grade container I have with tank water. There was some GHA (green hair algae) growing on my macro and I intended to deal with it later. Unfortunately one of the kids knocked over the container, spilling almost all the water and algae on my lounge room floor. So I stuffed it back in the container and put the lid on it - yeah, shutting the stable gate after the horse has bolted.
I asked my son to put the container outside while I cleaned the carpet with my wet/dry vax. I then completely forgot about it until I stumbled into it today, roughly 50+ days later. This container is 5mm thick lightproof high grade plastic, originally used to store chemicals used in milk processing. The chemical rapidly degrades in light and the containers are made accordingly, even the lids are really hard to get on and off.
Well stuff me. There was about 1cm of moisture in the bottom and pretty much dead macro to about half way up the container. But the GHA was still bright green. I put it in a bucket of fresh water and that shit is alive and well. I'll duplicate the experiment with photos as a future reference but I think it's safe to say that cutting down light in your average aquarium, isn't going to reduce GHA one little bit. Given that we've also had really cold temperatures here (including light snow) I reckon temperature isn't much of an issue for GHA either.
:eek
