Getting rid of Red Bubble Algae

While the live rocks were curing in the 72g, I had quite an outbreak of Red Bubble Algae pop up all over the rocks. Before putting the LR back into the tank, I tried to scrape as much red bubble algae off the LR as possible. After about a week the red bubble algae started to pop up again on the live rocks (see image below). I bought a couple of emerald crabs to eat the algae, but they only seem to like every other type of algae except the red bubble algae.

The emerald crabs couldn't really keep up with the algae growth so I decided to get a Yellow Hawaiian Tang to help the cleaning crew out. After a few days of having the Yellow Tang, I noticed some of the red bubble algae started to disappear. Today I witnessed the Yellow Tang actually eating the red bubble algae! He was tearing the red bubble algae up! Here's a few pics I snapped of him macking some red bubble algae:

Red Bubble Algae (Botryocladia skottsbergii) is also known as Red Valonia. The young red bubble algae has a grape like bladder and attaches directly to the substrate or live rock. The red alga can grow up to 1/3 inch in diameter.

So if your reef has botryocladia skottsbergii growing, go get yourself a Yellow Hawaiian Tang and watch it eat all your red bubble algae problems away. :) Of course, the Tang is only a quick solution to get rid of red bubble algae as it first starts to grow. If you have the red bubble algae taking over your tank, then you'll need to do a combination of the standard threefold approach to getting rid of any algae:

• Manually removing the problem algae
• Suppressing the algae with appropriate herbivores (in this case the Tang worked)
• Denial of resources - cut down the amount of time your lights stay on and maybe up the rate of your skimmer.