Snorkeler's Cube

Today I started my war against Valonia, officially. :-) Nothing too special, just decided it was time to start thinning them out by manual removal as a start.

I took a hose, 1/4inch, cut the tip at an angle to make it easy to scrape rock with it, and did a water change scraping the rocks. One rock that was literally covered with Valonias for months is now almost clear. Another water changes like this one should be enough to reduce the bulk of the Valonias.

Unfortunately I don't have pictures to post, as when I though about photographing the rock it was already too late and the lights had gone off....

One small detail/mistake that happened today: I removed 60L of water then discovered I only had 50L of new water ready to put back in... ugh... ... well, will put those other 10L in tomorrow...

In fact gotta buy new salt... time to visit the LFS...

Next step, after a few more of these "water change with rock scraping", will probably involve taking rocks out and scrubbing them to remove the more resistant Valonias and red bubble algae (have a lot of those too in some parts of the aquarium). I'm thinking of inviting some aquarium-friendly friends to help me out with that part (hi Dwight, hi Rodrigo, hi Ellery ).

I also have Valonias in the substrate... those I'm not sure how I'll remove... maybe only in stage 3 of the war, when I intend to start using a UV steriliser and maybe get a Foxface... problem is my aquarium apparently is too small for a Foxface so I'm still debating if I should do that, if he will be happy in my tank or not. Opinions? (tank description at top of blog, under title)