[vblue]

Ok, so I added a protein skimmer at Christmas and have been battling bubble algae ever since. I even went so far as to quarantine the fish and scrub the tank last weekend. Everything was nice and clean, but now the bubble algae is coming back. It is covering the top of all my live rock, and is in small patches on the sand. I was planning to order 10 Astrea snails, 10 Nassarius snails, 10 Blueleg hermits, and an Algae Blenny today. Will any of these take care of the algae? I also have some slight hair algae growing off the live rock, and a little bit of the brown stuff in the sand. Salinity is a little high (1.03) and my nitrates are running between 15-20. I can't seem to get the stuff to balance out. I thoroughly cleaned out the cannister filter when I did the tank this weekend. Please help!

[pogodzib]

Your skimmer isn't the cause of the bubble algae unless it was a used skimmer that just got taken out of another tank and had some bubble algae on it that got transfered. My guess would be that it is just a coincidence and that you probably had a bubble algae pop somewhere in your tank around the same time and that caused the bubble algae to show up all over the place all of a sudden. There are two main ways of getting bubble algae out of your tank. Hand harvesting it (carefully without popping the bubbles) and Mithrax crabs. Mithrax crabs usually eat it, but they can also mess with fish and corals so you need to keep an eye on them. The other critters that you listed don't usually feed on long hair algae, but if your hair problem is minor, they will take care of that and your diatom problem.

BTW - Since your running into bubble, hair, and brown diatom problems, you're water quality in your tank probably isn't ideal so adding a skimmer was a great investment. Also, since your nitrates are so high, make sure you clean your canister filter often, or better yet, remove it completely. It is not needed in any saltwater tank if you have a good protein skimmer. Adding more LR or feeding less may also help lower your nitrates.