Nano tank

I used to use Flourish, I've switched to dry ferts however. I thought you were only supposed to dose Flourish 1x/week? You could be overdosing ferts, I can't 100% remember with Flourish though. That 8-9 hour light cycle is long and could certainly be contributing. I've got an office tank on a 7hour timer. I used to run it for 9hours, got the brown algae I'm seeing in your tank real bad. Cut the light cycle down two hours and it's calmed down tremendously.

Oto's will be fine with your shrimp, no worries there and they will help out with that brown algae.

2 cherry shrimps are not going to have a large impact on the algae, consider increasing their number as it would also help starting the colony with good genetic diversity. Otos are okay with shrimps, the only issues I see is that the tank is rather small and Otos do prefer groups. Would you consider some snails ?

At 8 hours I don't think the light is too much but it might be too intense with a non CO2 enriched tank. Also as mgeorges suggests, maybe look more into correct dosing.

dukydaf said:

2 cherry shrimps are not going to have a large impact on the algae, consider increasing their number as it would also help starting the colony with good genetic diversity. Otos are okay with shrimps, the only issues I see is that the tank is rather small and Otos do prefer groups. Would you consider some snails ?

At 8 hours I don't think the light is too much but it might be too intense with a non CO2 enriched tank. Also as mgeorges suggests, maybe look more into correct dosing.

Click to expand...

What do I need to look at for dosing.

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I intended to buy more than two, but apparently his wife sold some he want aware of. So just got his last two. Need to find some more.

Not a huge fan of snails, but may have to for this situation.

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I would say snails are your last resort, once you have them you will ALWAYS have them.

I would cut the light to only 5 hours a day and cut the fertilizer dose way down. You don't have a heavy mass of plants yet that will need so much fertilizer. Run it this way for a couple of weeks and assess how the plants are doing and wether the algae is diminishing.

Also I find that if you get a pipette to dose the Excel and you apply the Excel directly to the algae it will have a more direct effect, but it doesn't effect all types of algae.

Good luck, the tank looks nice!

Around 2-3 weeks new tanks are most prone to algae in my experience. You have it running for just enough time to have developed a biofilm, gather some extra organic nutrient sources ( dead plants, fish food etc) and the algae have enough time to grow to being visible. For some reason, brown algae is also most common in new setups. If you get past the first 2 months you will have a lot less problems.

The plants look a little bit starved for macro nutrients. The Flourish Comprehensive is very very lean in its macro nutrient conc. especially N, P, K . Their recommendation of 5ml per 250L 2x per week would add 0.12ppm NO3 and 0.0042ppm PO4. Compare this to the conservative suggestions of PPS-Pro of 10ppm NO3, or to the more generous EI with 20-30ppm NO3, 3ppm PO4. Granted these values are for CO2 high light aquariums. You cannot just dose more of Flourish comp. because you will have too high Fe by the time you reach a good NO3.

Here is an article giving an overview on EI: https://www.ukaps.org/index.php?page=dosing-with-dry-salts
With this particular aquarium you can even start at 1/4 of EI levels and see how plants are doing.

If you do not like snails you can buy varieties that do not breed in freshwater or have eggs easily removable. Nerites (eggs do not hatch in freshwater) and apple snails (eggs are a big red clump above the waterline) are two of my favourites.

Just make sure to feed the ottos some algae tabs once the stuff in the tank is gone (assuming you keep them in there).