Bubble Algae Battle...

[Greatwhite]

No, I'm not reading Fox In Socks by Dr Suess (awesome read, btw)...

When I moved my tank from my old house to new, I noticed a significant bubble algae growth in "non visible" areas on my rock.  SO, being impatient and angry about the bubbles, I scraped them off carelessly and sucked all the bubbles out and down the drain.  Since rebuilding, I have 3 or 4 times MORE bubble algae than I had before - and it's all very visible.

I had been a little more carefully picking bubbles off my rock, and letting them stick to a powerhead, which I then had blow the bubbles into a small net for disposal.  But that hasn't actually done much for me.

I have a small army of emerald crabs, who supposedly LOVE this stuff.  But they are not really touching it.

SO I just decided that I'd check Youtube, because SOMEONE must have posted a video about removing this stuff.  I came across this video, and figured I'd share it here.

[embed=425,349]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeqtPe3XukM[/embed]

I have a LONG and WET battle ahead of me, because this stuff is pretty wide spread in my tank now.  I wish I had known that popping them caused them to spread sooner...

[robt18]

I kinda scanned through the video quickly... it looked to me like he popped a whole lot of them in the process. As you pointed out, popping them is a great way of spreading bubble algae. Instead of using a siphon, I've just removed them by hand in the past; bubble algae can be pretty strong and you can usually pull it off of rocks without popping it.The emerald crabs should be helping too, but when they 'eat' it, they usually turn it from green to clear, and the bubbles still remain there.

[Greatwhite]

Yeah, he popped a bunch.. But he had all the flow turned off to minimize the spread, and used his syphon to vacuum out the popped area to minimize spores.

When emeralds eat the bubbles, they pop - spreading the spores too...  He mentions that in the video. 

[Severum]

When I had my first SW tank, and knew nothing about anything, I would pop all the bubble algae stuck in my powerhead intake. I thought it was so fun to smash em up real good. Then I wondered why my tank ended up looking like ka-ka.

[robt18]

I meant to mention I watched without sound too... not working on this computer.

As long as the spores were removed that should at least slow the spread...

[Hookup]

I hate this algae.  Let me know how you beat it.

[az]

I'd recommend - change old bulbs, change phosphate media, stop dosing, manually remove algae outside tank regularly, clean powerheads regularly, clean out sump and lastly check water used for topping off/water change.
(Emerald crab is good prevention but not so good cure when algae takes over, you need 100 of them and no feeding)

I hate bubble algae, it can really take over.

[dbl_dbl]

The only thing that has ever worked for me is denial of resources:

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2002-02/hcj/feature/index.php

As Az said above, Emerald Crabs are also pretty impressive when controlling it but I found mine were very hot and cold. Sometimes I'd catch one munching down on it until the rock was clean, other days it seemed to literally be growing on their carapace. Oh, and they sometimes like tasty polyps.

[Severum]

Emerald crabs can certainly be hit and miss. The two I got preferred eating my colony of orange yumas over bubble algae... ugh.