I posted here last year and was at the end of my rope with the tank that I have and getting fish to successfully go from the quarantine tank to the display. Several of the members were helpful and I successfully got the quarantine tank to work properly and transferred some more fish to the display. A year later, I have a whole new set of problems.
First off, the hair algae in the tank is just growing on everything. I basically grow algae and keep some fish and
live rock from the looks of it. I've been cleaning the tank about once every week to two weeks. It is a 30 gallon tank and I have been doing 10 gallon water changes. With the mass of the
live rock and sand in the tank, this is about a 40% water change, if not closer to 50%. Everytime I change the water in the tank, I end up scrubbing off as much of the algae as possible from the pumps, filter, protein
skimmer pump - anywhere. I then siphon it out. The algae still comes back. It has gotten so bad that I am going to try doing 40% water changes twice a week to see if that helps.
To top things off, I think I killed one of my clown fish today while cleaning the tank. I fed the fish before cleaning, then shut everything down and began scrubbing and pumping the water out. Somehow, I sucked the clown fish up in to the siphon. He was struggling to get away and I immedately pulled the siphon up to release the suction. The fish just floated out of the 'vaccum" and to the bottom of the tank. I was able to pick it up, so I tossed the fish in the garbage. I felt really bad and my son (5 years old) was dissapointed.
My main questions are - how do I tackle this hair algae issue? Picking it out of the tank doesn't seem to help much. This isn't a few growths - it is practically the whole tank. My
nitrates have always been high and I suspect the bio load is too much for the tank, thus the hair algae. It is just that I've never seen it so bad. My last question would be, what could have killed the clown? He was fine one minute and then he's being sucked (by accident) in to the siphon and he's dead. Do these fish play possum? I just can't figure out what happened.
Any advice is greatly appreciated. I'm really find this hobby to be time consuming, frustrating and expensive - everything that friends told me it would be but I didn't listen.
Michael
