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Ok, so I have a 10 gallon tank and I am about to go through some rearranging in it. here is my problem:

I have a slab of marble at the bottom which is 5" square by 1" thick. it is partially buried in the substrate and has never been moved....until *gasp*!!!

I want to move it but I am afraid there will be yucky things built up underneath it that will release into the water when i disturb it... I dont want to harm my fish but I want to do all of my rearranging before I add any otos, which I would like to do pretty soon as I have tons of algae, some of the algae on some of my plants is about 3/4 of an inch long!! and I cant keep up with scrubbing it off the glass, and some parts of the glass have become bright green and fuzzy haha.

Doing some intensive gravel vacs around the base of the marble will help. You can also remove the fish to another tank or bucket while you're doing this. If you have that much algae, you also might want to look @other solutions in addition to algae eaters .

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well I have been cleaning the algae off the sides of the tank but I just have to do it sooooo often.... I figure some algae eaters ought to at least slow down the regrowth.

What I was trying to say politely, is that you might want to find the root cause of why you have so much algae growth. And what type of algae it is to begin with. If you're not doing proper tank maintenece just adding ottos won't really help, and may be the ottos death warrent.
If it's cynobacteria and not just algae, then no fish you buy will eat it.

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well honestly I think the main reason why I have so much algae is because... ok...

here is a happy lil pathetic MS paint map:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v175/devon7/map.jpg

yeah so I think it is because of the sunlight, I cant think of any other reasons... I thought it might have been from overfeeding, but I started feeding pretty much the bare bone minimum about a week ago and there have been no results.

not totally sure what kind of algae it is though... its lime green and about 1/2 an inch long on plant leaves mostly. its thicker on the edges of the plant leaves. it is also on the glass, not sure if its the same algae that is on the glass and the plants, but it is the same color and texture, the stuff on the plants is just longer, probably because I dont scrub my plants up really close it looks like tons of tiny clumps of 3 or 4 tiny strands.

What's the nitrate level at ?

The Amazon Nut...

i will test it tonight, i had to get a new nitrate test kit today cause mine was old an used up.

the test is very hard to read but it looks around 60, but it could be anywhere between 40 and 80

btw today i used some skinny tubing to syphon the bad water from underneath the marble. i just slid the tube under it. gravel kept getting stuck in it so it was a pain, but it worked. then I just picked up the marble and did a gravel vac on the whole tank and moved everything around, and there wasnt too much sediment.

I took the peice of marble out, I decided I dont like the way it looks, but it was cool for a while cause the fish went skating on it

Good job on the cleaning.. The nitrates are too high if going by that last test. 15 is a good level to try and maintain, more than that and the algae bloom begins. Removing that gunk and vaccing a bit along with the small water change sure helped lower it I'll bet

If you're using nitrate test strips, I suggest going for the liquid test, WAY more cost effective (about 4 times the tests for the same price)


The Amazon Nut...