Hello!
I am new and I just set up my tank about three days ago. On the third day I noticed that my macroalgae, bought from petshrimp.com has become white/produced a white substance. In addition to that, there are white weblike and sort of slimely looking structures floating through the water that I believe appear to come from the macroalgae as well.
To give a bit of detail, I've set up three different tanks/jars. Each tank has two macroalgaes, five supershrimp, and 3/4 brackish snails. Two of the tanks are half gallons, and the third is a gallon. Two of the tanks exhibited the white growth on the macroalgae with minimal to no weblike structures. The third jar's macroalgae has very little to no white residue, however this tank does have more white weblike structures. This excess growth of the weblike structures could be due to the excess time of algae being left in there compared to the first two jars perhaps ? For the first two tanks, after spotting the white residue on the algae I took the macroalgae out for the past couple hours, therefore I believe there might have been less time for the weblike structures to have developed as compared to the third.
Should I be concerned? If so, how do I go about removing these white residues.
HELP! White Residue
Moderator: Mustafa
Re: HELP! White Residue
It definitely resembles bacteria, perhaps more clarification on parameters, especially salinity, may help to determine a cause.
Re: HELP! White Residue
Some more details! I rinsed substrate and rocks with distilled water. For the water, I mixed the amount of super-shrimp salt pre-measured and sold at the store for 3 gallons with 3 gallons of distilled water in a bucket. I haven't fed the shrimp anything extra so therefore I don't believe it would be excess food associated with white algae as said online. I did however added small amounts of the water that the shrimp was packaged in into the tank and the lid of the jar is made of wood. I don't know if any of the latter would have any association with this buildup. Other than that, I pretty much followed the instructions as provided on their website! I also followed the same steps and used the same tools as my friend that previously made a jar a week before, and his jar had no white residue on his macroalgae whatsoever, therefore I am quite confused why mine is different!