Why do people grow chaeto or caluerpa in their refugium? Cause it is easy to harvest and it consumes nutrients to starve out unwanted hair algae.
I have seen the alternative of using an algae matt, like a piece of plastic webbing sheet (like 7 mesh) to grow large amounts of hair algae, this is really easy to harvest, just remove the sheet, wash off the algae and put in a clean sheet. Also maybe this hair algae grows faster than the macros. So why don't most folks go this way? Maybe because one does not want any hair algae in the refugium since it can spread to the DT but every DT on the planet has a finite amount of hair algae and it is virtually impossible to have a tank with zero hair algae. Also one oftens buys a starter chunk of macro to seed their refugium but hair algae is free. Some folks like to feed caluerpa to their tanks, for those that don't care about that, why do we use caluerpa instead of algae matts? Thanks.
I have seen the alternative of using an algae matt, like a piece of plastic webbing sheet (like 7 mesh) to grow large amounts of hair algae, this is really easy to harvest, just remove the sheet, wash off the algae and put in a clean sheet. Also maybe this hair algae grows faster than the macros. So why don't most folks go this way? Maybe because one does not want any hair algae in the refugium since it can spread to the DT but every DT on the planet has a finite amount of hair algae and it is virtually impossible to have a tank with zero hair algae. Also one oftens buys a starter chunk of macro to seed their refugium but hair algae is free. Some folks like to feed caluerpa to their tanks, for those that don't care about that, why do we use caluerpa instead of algae matts? Thanks.
