Okay, we know that we have spent our last three blogs educating you about how to defeat algae so promoting algae may well catch you off guard. The fact of the matter is though lots of your organisms can benefit from consuming algae and if your fish food bill has grown to a substantial amount you may well benefit from letting your fish eat something that you don’t even need to provide! Okay without further ado let’s get into why algae growth can be great… stick with us we promise it’s good stuff!

Catfish

The amount of algae eaters is actually a lot higher than you think. A quick google search can help you discover a hell of a lot of algae eating organisms, for example, the Otocinclus Catfish, a small but useful creature that due to its size can access algae in all kinds of places. Keeping it in the catfish family we can also talk about the Twig Catfish. This one is essentially an algae hoover. Feeding the Twig Catfish is expensive stuff so letting them feast on what your aquarium is supplying them with is certainly not a bad idea.

Snails

When it comes to an aesthetically pleasing algae eater you won’t get much better than Nerite Snails. They eat every kind of algae you can possibly find but they’ll also eat your plants so you may want to go with a different breed of snails. Ramshorn Snails are a fantastic alternative to the Nerite since they will be kept busy by algae and steer clear of your plants if they’re being provided with enough food.

Shrimp

Shrimp are another organism that will keep your algae in check. The Ghost Shrimp the cheapest variant you will find but consequently, don’t do as good of a job as their algae eating relatives. Both the Cherry Shrimp and Amano Shrimp are great at keeping algae in check. The Amano, in particular, are very popular since they are always hungry and eat pretty much any algae that gets put in front of them. They are pretty hard to sustain since they have a temperamental diet and living conditions but they are great for algae eating all the same.

A Final Word

See! We told you algae isn’t all bad! Algae is a great alternative to fish food so seriously consider changing your tank fundamentals a little if you want to save a little bit of money.