sir_keith said:
There are only a handful of freshwater aquarium fishes that will eat black beard algae, and none of the Mbuna are among them. SAE's are perhaps the best known fishes that will eat black beard algae.
Not true at all. Many, if not most fish will eat it.
I think it's the expectation that fish will some how completely eliminate it or eradicate it, that leads to statements that fish do not eat it. But they certainly do.
If you have a lot of black brush algae in the tank, and grow it well enough......you will see that even most cichlids will eat it at some point in time. Mbuna will graze on it occasionally. Go a week with out feeding the fish and especially young mbuna, will spend a fair amount of time grazing on it. The green waste coming out of the fish, after a week with out adding food in the tank, is proof they actually eat the stuff. Another example , I had a large female Blackbelt that was a fairly fussy eater. Since I feed variety, there were short periods of time feeding frozen, and no pellets, and she would not eat what I was feeding. Not only do I see her eating the black brush algae, but i see the waste coming out of her is green. Now, with really established Black Brush algae, I'll grant that cichlids won't eat enough of it to make any real difference.
But algae eaters such as common pleco (
Pterygoplichthys pardalis), Gold-spot salifin pleco (
Pterygoplichthys joselimaianus, CAE, and BN pleco will not only eat it, but they will consume huge amounts of it. Huge amounts! Again, it's the expectation that a fish would eradicate or eliminate it that leads to the notion they won't eat the stuff. Many of these algae eaters will spend most of their day making a pass over the algae. There is a very noticeable difference between black brush algae that is less then 1/8" or black brush algae that has grown to 1/2" or more. By making a pass over it every day, the new growth is eaten, and the algae stays very short. These same tanks with the algae eater removed, and now no algae eater in the tank, the black brush algae grows to 1/2" or longer with in a few months. Put the algae eater back in the tank, and after many months, it will be eaten back down to 1/8" or less. Another example, when I only had a CAE in my 180 gal. , he was kept away from the ends of the tank by aggressive cichlids. Unable to make a pass at both ends of the tank, the black brush grew to over 1/2" at both ends but was kept down to less the 1/8" in the middle part of the tank.
None of these fish are "goats". They won't eliminate a source of food by eating it down to nothing. But they certainly will eat it. And algae eaters, large amounts of it. Occasionally, a common pleco will eliminate very old black brush algae by spending a number of hours on a rock, or completely eliminate dying black brush that has turned red/pink (for example when a rock has been placed on top of BB blocking out the light for many days/weeks and then the rock is removed exposing the dying algae) but normally they only eat the new, young growth.
Now, one place I don't really want Black brush algae in my tanks is on the plastic plants. My bigger plecos, like the common and Joselmanius do not even go on plastic plants as the surfaces are really not large enough for them to go on let alone frequent. So every few many months I remove the plastic plants to treat them and it completely eliminates the algae on their surfaces. My very first attempt was with hydrogen peroxide . I did this in the bath tub. At the time I had a 6 foot piece of drift wood with plastic plant tied to it. Oddly enough, the middle part of the 6 foot drift wood did not die off very much, and with in about 2 weeks looked just as it did before while the rest of the plastic plants looked like new again. I rinsed the plastic plants by submerging them in hot water to get rid of the hydrogen peroxide but since the 6 ft. piece of driftwood was longer the the bath tub only the ends got submerged and the middle only got water pored over it. It then became obvious to me that it was actually the hot water treatment that had killed the BB and not so much the hydrogen peroxide. I have used a hot water treatment many times over the last few years and it works 100% to kill BB algae.(though it can grow back in a matter of weeks/months). I also just realized why I have a curved streak along the side of my 125 gal. where the BB is very short (and almost eliminated in comparison to the lush growth on the other side of the streak). It's where the water runs off the wall of the tank when I put back new water during a water change. The wall is submersed in new water and exposed to chloramine for the time it takes to fill the tank. So I think it's not just the heat of a hot water treatment that makes it so effective, but at least in part to chloramine. Its speculation on my part, but many algae can have symbiotic relationships with bacteria, and BB may very well be one of those. Chloramine kills bacteria; might be killing bacteria that it needs to survive.