[Mattfish]

By now, we have quite a cleaning crew in the tank, and just put in some more snails and hermits over the weekend. Despite our best efforts as teachers, we still get a lot of green algae growth on the tank walls, along with the coralline algae that we want. I keep hoping that they'll catch on and clean this, but is there any way to "point them in the right direction"? I would think it's what they want and yet they don't seem to notice it, while cleaning off other areas that are harder to get to like the powerheads - they have to crawl right by the algae on the tank walls to get tot he tuff on the powerheads, but they do it.... maybe we're not paying them enough?

As an aside, we have a background on the tank - the back faces a window which gets morning sun - and the tank lights are on for a long time - right now, the timer turns them on at 8am and goes to moon around 9.30pm. The moons stay on until around 3.30 or 4am.....

[glampka]

Mike,
You bought the wrong CUC. Take them back. There are special snails that handle glass cleaning! You have the ones that handle powerheads & heaters. Nothing you can do but take the powerheads away & force feed them.

[Mattfish]

I knew it! I should have asked more questions. Mine do floors (not well), and don't do windows. I hate being a novice - you never know what's important until it's too late.

I better go back to my lfs and get the right kind of slimy things.....

[Cela Vie]

That's a good one glampka.

BTW, I'd be happy if the CUC took care of everything but the glass. The glass is quite easy to keep clean with a mag-float. It's the powerheads and stuff that is a pain. I say you've got the right bunch of workers there. They're just making sure you do your part. Who's the lazy one now?

[Mattfish]

You certainly hit one issue right on the head - as it happens, on virtually every spell checker, my last name spell checks to lazy. For real. And laziness in my family is genetic, so I don't even feel bad.....

[mtfabel]

Your not confusing green coraline algae for green nuisance algae are you? Because coraline algae comes in many colors. Green, Pink, Purple, Orange, and even White.

[Mattfish]

I don't think so - on the LR we have hard purple, green, white, red, orange, etc sections that are growing and spreading slowly. Rather than the soft, flowy green algae that we get on the sides of the tank, PH's, areas of LR, etc.

But since we're going on vacation next week, we're getting the guy from our lfs to watch the tank and our blue and gold macaw, so he's comin over Sunday night to take a look at the tank and see how we're doing, make suggestions, etc and I'll make sure about what we're doing and seeing....