Well, yeah the floating plants will cut some of the light to plants
below, depending also on how large you let them grow. My tank also
has only 1.5 wpg and I have the plants I mentioned, I just make sure
that the floating plants don't cover very much of the surface. They
usually collect around the sides of the tank, because of the water
current, where they block even less light. There are several fast
growing rooted plants - aponogeton and water sprite are the ones that
I'm most familiar with. You can get aponogeton bulbs at Walmart -
half of them won't sprout, but at least they're cheap.

You need to fiddle around with the nutrients to see what's missing.
Try adding a little co2. You don't have to rush out and buy a co2
system yet, first you can try adding some Flourish Excel. If they're
lacking in co2 you'll see a difference in growth within 1-2 weeks.

Have you tested your water for nitrates? How large is your fish load?
Do you tend to overfeed? Do you have snails and/or other bottom
feeders to clean-up? Do you add too little/too much fertilizer?

My tank has probably been through every type of algae. But it only
gets out of control when I get lazy and don't make the attempt to
balance the nutrient levels. When you strike just the right balance
the plants will take over and the algae will start to dissappear.

Cris

On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 04:44:01 -0500, Dick
wrote:

Won't the floating plants cut the light getting to the bottom. I have
less than 1.5 watts per gallon now and that is the reason I have
ordered low light plants.

This is all very confusing. Why have my other 3 tanks not had the
Black Hair Algae problem?

On Sat, 27 Sep 2003 21:41:24 GMT, Cris
wrote:

Low light plants are also slow growers. To combat algae it's better
to have fast growers like water sprite, aponogeton, frogbit, and most
other floating plants. There is some nutrient that you either have in
excess or too little of. Most commonly it will be an excess in
phosphate, nitrate, or iron. It could also be too little or too much
light (depending on the other nutrient levels). All your nutrients
have to balance along with plants that can use the nutrients before
the algae can.

Cris


On Sat, 27 Sep 2003 05:07:10 -0500, Dick
wrote:

I purged out a message that suggested adding more plants and more
water changes would minimize algae. I had my tank full of plants and
changed water once a week. While the green algae on the glass was
tolerable, the black hair algae continued to thrive.

Next week I am getting a shipment of low light plants and plan to
remove all existing plants and as much from the gravel as possible. I
don't know the source of the bha. It has only taken root, ha, ha, in
one tank, the largest of 4 of course.

I recently added Siamese Algae Eaters, but they seem to have no
impact. I am going to add more SAEs next week.

To my eye the bha is very ugly. Has anyone successfully rid their
tank of the stuff? I will have to live with it is my fear. I am not
going to strip the tank of fish, gravel, plants and fill it with
chlorine to solve the problem. I disturb my fish enough with trying
to control bha by removing the obvious leafs and pulling the hairy
gravel up.