Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss...

or, more appropriately, moving water grows no algae.

The Guppy Girl tank is showing no sign of Blue Green Algae growth so far and even the regular green algae have lost their enthusiasm. Could I have finally cured the tank? It is so nice to see the bright white sand and vivid colors of the plants with fishies swimming around happily!

I am beginning to think that the whole problem could have been avoided if I only used an air stone to improve aeration and encourage water movement in the first place. It would seem with one filter in the corner and lots of plants to block the current, the water gets very stagnant very quickly. This created perfect conditions for BGA slime to thrive. The air stone is on the opposite end of the tank from the filter, so, in theory, the water circles from one to the other.

So, with this small success, I decided to do a small experiment: Teddy's tank at work is again starting to grow BGA again, though not at the same rate as the one at home. This afternoon I introduced the same little air stone connected to a small air pump and was surprised to immediately see the water moving a lot. How? Well, a lot of debris, like parts of leaves, strings of BGA, shed shrimp exoskeletons, is suddenly swimming around. That's also sign it's time to clean the tank, but I thought with the experiment I'll wait till Monday.

Teddy is a bit freaked out never having had air current in his tank before, but I'm sure he'll adjust. It's probably better for him in the long run anyway.

On a funny note, today I observed one of the Amano Shrimp clean a large swath of BGA off one of the Lutea leaves, clean to the "bone". Man, those guys are good cleaner upers. Just imagine - if I had about 20 of them in there, I'd never have the algae problem in the first place. I just hope he doesn't get a tummy ache... Do shrimp even get tummy aches?