A little sad

[FloFlow]

When I joined I was excited to get to sharing my beautiful tank but I've hit a roadblock. I supposed that's where a lot of first tank keepers give up on the hobby, but I plan on continuing. Basically, all was going well until...I got a cladophora outbreak in my tank. This thing is a nightmare. It's been choking out a lot of my plants, stealing their nutrients in the water, thriving under the light. Clado is happy and thrives on the same conditions mosses and other plants thrive in, so I can't out compete it. Maybe if I had caught it earlier I could have done something but I mistook it for hair algea, and now it's everywhere. The problem is that it got to the roots of my floaters and a bunch of them are dying out now, along with it attaching itself to other plants and blocking the light. This has let to the water quality getting poorer and the blue dream shrimps I got went from thriving to going down in number.

I feel pretty sad and powerless. The only thing I can do really is rescape the entire tank. I got a 20 gallon for free from someone who got out of the hobby and I had a space filter and light, so I've been cycling a backup tank to move my pleco and the shrimps that have survived, but cycling takes time as you all know.

On the bright side I moved some of the filter from my own tank to the backup tank so cycling is going faster this time around. However, recently the clado has made it to invade the inside of my filter intake, something I was hoping to avoid, which means that most likely, even if I break everything down, it might come back unless I also disinfect the filter which will...obviously kill all the bacteria, which means I will have to start the cycling from 0 on the big tank.

I feel pretty bummed about it. I can see why some people leave the hobby after their first tank fail.

But I'm trying to see the bright side. Since the backup tank is cycling faster (finally seeing significant amonia drop after two weeks and getting faster) I will most likely be able to save the remaining shrimps (the pleco is thriving right now, all things considered, the shrimps are the ones I am worried about).

It's an opportunity to redo my scape since there was some problems with it I couldn't really fix, tied to things like water flow and a rather bad resin hide I regret putting in the tank initially. I also don't think I will lose all of my plants. I will have to do a one two punch of hydrogen peroxide followed by excel to kill off the clodo (that treatment kills marimo moss ball, so it will kill clado or at least, free my plants from it enough that I can put them in a bucket and do further individual treatment). I will most likely lose the moss and liverworts but...I don't know, I love this hobby, I don't want to give up. I've learned a harsh lesson on why strict quarantine procedures are important when adding plants to your tank and a lesson on having hides that are easy to reach for cleaning, as well as a lesson on not placing hardscape in such a way that it makes water flow difficult to optimize.

The new tank is going to be better. The livestock is going to do fine in the backup tank while I have to disinfect, it has plants, rocks, driftwood, medium lighting, just no substrate.

I guess reading a lot on fish tank is no replacement for experience.

I do have some questions though, for experienced keepers who had to rescape a tank.

It mainly has to do with the substrate. I use a high quality aquasoil which has started to breakdown since I am a couple of months in to this tank (becomes more powdery). I have no doubt some of it is spent. Would it be a good idea to mix in some fresh aquasoil since I have to rescape anyway? Or would I be fine just sticking some root tabs in there? Finally I was curious about whether people have any suggestions about moving micro fauna. I moved some of the miniature ramshorn snails from the old tank to the backup tank (they're doing great despite the tank still cycling, these are a miniature version that don't get much bigger than 2-3 mm, they hitchiked on a plant but I like them) however I am wondering how I can move the copepods that appeared in my tank one day. I love them as a cleanup crew and they'll be a good food for future fish I put in the tank since they're so small, they can probably feed even tiny fish. But that's the problem, I can catch tiny snails easily but I can't exactly catch such tiny creatures to seed the backup tank. Does anyone have any suggestion about how I could catch some? Put in a blanched slice of zucchini and then move the slice to the backup tank perhaps?

Thanks for reading this if you did. I'm all ears for further advice people may have. I am still ultimately new and this was a very humbling experience.

[charlie]

Sorry to hear about the algae outbreak and the associated frustration.
In the past I had good success with manual removal , spot treatment and increased water flow via power heads.
If you are going to rescape the tank , it will be a good opportunity to refresh your substrate.
I'm a bit surprised the soil is breaking down already, perhaps you can bake the old substrate and sift out the fine broken down soil.

[FloFlow]

I will be honest, I am not sure it's breaking down? I got a formula that's powdered form so when the squishy pebble breaks, it turns into powder. The problem is that it looks just like mulm, so it might judt be mulm.

I have been trying all of those techniques but unfortunately the kind of algea I have seems resistant to those treatment. Manual removal just ended up spreding it everywhere. At this point spot treatment is impossible, everything is laced with it.

[FloFlow]

So chiming on on this. The treatment worked until it didn't. The new rescape is beautiful but the algea is back. I am starting to think this might not actually be cladophora but regular hair algea, becauss it hasn't appeared in my other tank despite sharing plants and livestock. I am desperate to figure out the cause tbh, I have narrowed it down to maybe my lights being too high and the tank having too many dead spots when it comes to water flow. Maybe it's a phosphate issue? I really have no idea.

[Biulu]

Try to change 1 thing at a time to find out what it could be. How long are your lights on? If it is hair algae, then intense light >8 hours could be the culprit. Extra flow is never bad.

[FloFlow]

The light is less than 8 hours. But I spoke to a friend who's more experienced than me and made me realize the fertilizer I use is absolutely not enough for the amount of plants I have. That explains the stunted growth. Since the plants are sucking up the nutrients fast, they can't grow and fend off or out compete the hair algea, leading to an explosion. I've ordered a really good macro and micro nutrient product from theplantguy to fix this, for now I have reduced light intensity and co2. That plus the new flow should help the plants in the long run. for now, keeping the lights low + manual removal is what I will do until I get the new product.

[FloFlow]

Posting an update. The new fertilizer regiment absolutely saved my tank, it wasn't this horrible algea I thought it was but rather regular hair algea and doing the estimative index method combined with high lights and co2 eradicated it as it could just not compete. The tank is lush and beautiful now and I have to trim the plants all the time and I love it. All was well.

I say was because a new enemy appeared and this time there's no product or outcompeting that can save me.

I have a bad case of Utricularia gibba. Or, a bladderwort. I tried to manage it, the only way is through constent persistent removal but by the point I noticed it, it was already pretty established and removing all of it manually is very difficult. It's also one of those plants that breaks apart when you pull it and the segments can grow new plants, it's why you have to keep at it once you notice it until it's gone. Kind of like when you have duckweed established in your tank and you decide you don't want duckweed anymore, but harder to get rid of because the tank is so big and the plant is intermingled with the mosses and the carpet.

The plant is not affected by things like excel. Because it's a carnivoroous plant that survives on microphona, it can't be outcompeted, it need little in the way of nutrients compared to other plants. There's no magic solution, just hard work.

The way I see it, I have two paths in font of me. One is to spent a long time every day and pull as much of it as possible until it's gone and to trim my plants very very low to the ground to keep it from mingling with the leaves. It's fine because they can regrow. The carpet and moss is a problem but I can manually remove the parts of the moss where it's really bad and again, the moss can regrow (that said this moss really needs a trim, I just haven't figured out how to trim moss without making a mess).

The other way would be to rescape the entire tank. Pull out the plants, boil all the rocks, hydrogen peroxide dip. I rescaped once already and I am not sure I want to do it again but there's a lot of nooks and cranny where the plant could hide and it would be the only way to 100% make sure no stand is left anywhere.It is an endeavour though. First I would have to catch the livestock and put it in a backup tank, then the carpet took forever to grow in and I would be sad to pull it out. Not everything can survive a peroxide dip either.

However there might be another option. I can't find information on wether it would work on this particular plant or not but maybe the blackout method could work. I never tried it and I am not sure how to go about it but it's worth a try, I guess.

I really wanna post picture of my aquariums on this forum and someday I will finally have won my fight against all of these issues that keep cropping up. I am so close to the tank of my dream, I can feel it.

But I learned a valuable lesson about quarantining plants. This is a hitchiker that came on my floaters. I didn't think much of it at first. Should've been careful.

[FloFlow]

Update: I did a teardown of the main tank and it worked! I have eradicated the liverwort and I think that's the last issue I'm going to experience with this particular tank. The plants melted a lot but now they're growing again, the carpeting plant is spreading, the shrimp colony is happy. I have been taking weekly picture since the teardown and rebuild to see the progress.

The corydoras and the lemon pleco are still in my backup tank because I don't want to risk them uprooting the freshly rooted plants and knocking over the freshly glued anubias (or the moss). I'm giving it a month's time or so and then I will bring them back, just to make sure the anubias and the moss are affixed solidly and so I have time to plant and replant cutting for a nice dense look on the plants before adding the corydoras. when I figure out how to upload piture and when the tank is more established, I'll post pictures of it as well as my smaller tank, which I rescaped recently.

[FloFlow]

So good news, the bladderwort is gone and has never come back!

Bad news, I now have staghorn. I swear I keep running into issues since picking up this hobby. At least staghorn is not something that requires drastic actions, but I am receiving a lot of conflicting information on how to deal with it.