Hi, I've given this some more thought and re read a few things.
Has anyone tried using Frozen vs live Artemia?
I feed a lot of brine shrimp and have rather high fish loading.
I also have several tanks like this(more replicates).
I feed not just brine, but Blood worms, Mysis, flake(tetra flake), spirulina sticks(pretty heavy). I also have a live brine with 3 container going. I also have good filtration and keep up on it.
If organic matter is really the root cause, we should be able to induce BBA doing this, correlation is a very dangerous thing to make the assumption. We need/must confirm(not just "me too's") and be willing to actively try and induce BBA and make sure we can also keep very good tabs on CO2/light/dosing/aquarium keeping, filtrations/water changes while testing etc.
CO2 can play games on you. What are you adding besides fish food when you load a lot of fish food in there?
Just organic matter?
No........you are adding a lot of NH4. What does that do to plants? More, less growth? What if you have leaner N? Then add a fair amount of NH4? What about if you have higher light?
Algae? I've seen this pattern when I did a fish loading experiment.
My goal was to add proggressively more and more fish loading to an aquarium until I got an algae bloom. Folks always say you have to add KNO3 to high light tanks with CO2 and fish waste alone cannot do it using plain sand.
I put that to the test back in 2001.
This was the tank and general amount of plant biomass I used:
Not much plant biomass(easier to destabilize) and high light, about 200 micromol at the bottom!, 450 at the surface, quite a bit. Did weekly 60% water changes, dosed EI etc. The tap was rock hard. KH 11, GH 24. Flourite sediment.
I was able to induce Green water initially, then staghorn and finally BBA. BBA has never appeared rapidly, it always takes a few days or even weeks.
So the speed of dosing the parameter of interest with the treatment does not match well here I think. It still might be due to the feeding, but I think it was when you did it further back, consider that also.
Green water is rapid, the fastest to respond IME to inducement, but only under high light, Staghorn and BBA will grow find in lower/low light. Green water tends be pretty rare in low light tanks, but many of the same principles with NH4 apply to lower light tanks, but with different algae species that will take the place of phytoplankton which tend to require much higher light than many epiphytes.
So perhaps the CO2 demand went up adding more N, and the NH4 issue may have helped induce the algae spores to grow. Either way, you must confirm before really speculating much. If you have a hunch or a hypothesis, test it, confirm it, then you know more about the problem and you also know how to get rid of it in the future.
So while many do not want to consider inducing algae, it's really the only decent way to test
And if you know the causes..........then you also "knows" the cures.
Still, now you have a tank with BBA, so that much be cleaned out first before applying a new test or another replication block.
Then you can test again.
GW is great because a UV takes care of that in 2-3 days for further test.
BBA takes weeks.
I've also seen this same issue with fish load and BBA in Alan's tanks, he feeds a lot an dhas a massive bioload, but not that high of light. He resolved the issue by simply doing daily automated water changes, which does what?
Removes all the fish waste which is mostly NH4, adds O2 and CO2 also.
Same deal with fish breeders who add lots of food, they do very frequent water changes.
Seems to me much more a fish loading and over feeding issue, and it's different than adding say just NH4 alone. Fish waste/rotting food/too many fish/shrimp etc, adds fecal matter and "packets of waste" that fall and settle on the sediment. These are surrounded by much higher levels of NH4 and other nutrients than the surrounding water. The spores are where?
Not in the water column. The nutrients also are where? Not in the water column.
The current that mixes the water well is also not in the sediment, maybe the top 1/2 cm, but it drops off very fast deeper in the sediment.
Algae spores are like "seeds", once they get the signal it a good time to grow, they germinate. This can be swimming zoospores that will swim around and attach where they think is a good spot to grow. Then start to grow into an adult turf/tuff, thread etc.
This is basic algae ecology.
This is not something I pulled out of my hind end
And it applies to learning about algae and confirming the causes. Speculating is meaningless unless you test that speculation and make sure you can confirm the results a few times. I see endless babbling on forums about algae, but few if any ever test or confirm with logic. Why fear something you now understand?
Unless you do test/confirm(or not), and understand the pest's life history and ecology, I think you really place yourself at a severe disadvantage and cannot answer the question(or pose new ones once those are answered).
However,such results and confirmation does not imply that there is only one possible reason for an algae spore to germinate either. There may be others.
Adding too much fish and bioload, food, plant waste etc can induce at least 3 species I am aware of and BBA is one of them.
Rgards,
Tom Barr
