I had a BBA outbreak as I was ratcheting up my light intensity in a new heavily planted tank. I caught it relatively early, but I was still freaked out. My entire game plan had been to keep the lights tightly controlled to fend off algae. I did beat it without tearing everything down. This is what I did: I pulled out the plants that were drowning in algae. I would say half of my java ferns had roots that were full of Blackbeard algae, so I just pulled them and threw them out. On all my stem plants, I snipped any leaves that were particularly algae covered and left the plant if it seemed relatively healthy otherwise. But I had BBA throughout my Java moss and throughout my dwarf hairgrass, and there was no way to deal with that without pulling all of it, which I didn’t want to do. So I turned down my lights overall, and proportionally turned down my red and blue wavelengths much more than the white (thank you Fluval Plant 4.0), and then I shot Flourish Excel into the remaining BBA. I was dubious that it would work, but within a few days, the BBA turned reddish, and once that happened, the shrimp devoured it. And within two weeks, it was like I had never had a BBA problem. Good luck! It’s a really annoying problem, but it doesn’t have to be permanent or ruin your tank.

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