Where do your seaweeds come from?

Everything seems to have been written about algae in aquariums!

Reading some forums or social networks, one might even believe that aquaristics is primarily about fighting algae. Filamentous algae, brush algae, green water, even cyanobacteria which are a primitive form of them... We all tear our hair out trying to banish these diabolical beings from our aquariums and ponds, usually with at best a temporary result, almost always nonexistent.

A researcher friend once told me, when I asked him about the moss invading my lawn: "The only effective way to get rid of the moss problem is to stop seeing it as a problem. That’s the only thing that works."

The same person explained to me that anyone who thinks they must eradicate foxes to save their chickens should ask themselves why they hate nature so much, wanting to eradicate it rather than adapt to it.

 

How do algae get into our aquariums?

Is it by introducing a plant that carries them? They all carry them, except in vitro plants that live in a sterile bubble! And they even need them to live, as they are part of their microbiota. Plants are covered with hundreds of species of bacteria, viruses, algae, various microbes and could not live normally without them.

You have to choose: either the sterile environment or the open environment.

The sterile environment is a mirage. Even laboratories would be unable to conceive and maintain it sustainably.

So, you might say, let’s at least try not to introduce too many algae by carefully cleaning everything that goes into the aquarium!

 

Look at this young tree, which has been pruned.
See how green the cut is. They are essentially algae. They are scarcely present on the bark, but they have been well nourished on the pruning wound. No relation to the fact that the bark did not receive any.

Yes, algae are everywhere, and no one inoculated these algae on this tree. They came on their own, with the air and dust. Millions of spores.

It is now known that in just one gram of surface soil, several hundred different species of algae are counted! This was unknown, but high-throughput DNA sequencing recently revealed it. We know less than 5% of these species! Their spores are carried by the wind and are everywhere in the air, by the millions.

 

Our aquariums, unless hermetically sealed and thus sterile, are also seeded every day by the ambient air with at least dozens of species of algae. Life is everywhere, and it is much stronger than our dreams of control!

Trying to avoid introducing algae is futile. Even tap water contains some. Not much, but always a little.

 

Fill a bottle with this water you believe lifeless, close it and put it in the sun: sooner or later you will see cyanobacteria, unicellular algae in suspension (green water), and perhaps soon filamentous algae appear!

And what if that was therefore normal?

And what if algae served a function?

 

If it is futile to want none at all, one can however limit them by favoring fast-growing plants. Elodea, Egeria najas, hornwort, vallisneria and many others deprive algae of food because they are so greedy.

Do not use any fertilizer: these plants consume resources and slow their growth when the water becomes poor. Good: the algae are in shortage!

Personally, I have gotten into the habit of occasionally removing filamentous algae or various cladophora by hand. It's pleasant to do, quick, natural, and much less time-consuming and messy than changing your filter every month!

Avoid algicides at all costs. Removing the problem by killing algae will only unbalance the whole, shift the problem, and above all introduce a toxic biocidal molecule.

 

Tolerate, limit, observe, be patient.
With nature, only compromise works sustainably.

Your fish, on the other hand, don't care.
Your snails feast on them.
Your micro-fauna and your fry hide there.

Are your plants not unharmed?
Think of the young tree in the photo, the old tree covered with lichen, and even your skin covered with a microbiota (including many mites!) that it could not do without.

Life is magnificent in its complexity. It is everywhere.

Let's garden our aquariums like the wise man gardens his garden: without intransigence.