Algae-Eating Fishes for the Marine Aquarium

Most aquarists realize it’s difficult to find algae on the reef in the wild, yet, there’s always some calcareous and/or turf alga because they are actually important building components of any natural reef system. But with the reef’s surrounding water nutrient poor and herbivores keeping what there is of algae well mowed, little or none is readily visible. Nevertheless, it’s another story in shallow inland waterways and bays where nutrients have a tendency to accumulate. There, algae in various forms and amounts can easily be seen and it’s these that present the most problems for many aquarists. In fact, the aquarist that has never had to do battle with an unwanted alga growth is quite rare!

In today’s timeframe we tend to laugh somewhat when we look back a decade or two when most aquarists considered healthy growths of micro or macroalgae an indicator of good water quality. ... For the rest of this article including its photos, which was written for TFH and printed in their June 2010 issue Click Here