Slimey Wood!

[Macko1968]

Currently cycling a tank & have a piece of wood that I bought from my LFS in there.

I've just noticed a whitish slime has developed all over the wood. Any ideas what this could be & how I can best get rid of it?

 

[jonnyf84]

Currently cycling a tank & have a piece of wood that I bought from my LFS in there.

I've just noticed a whitish slime has developed all over the wood. Any ideas what this could be & how I can best get rid of it?

to be honest i dont know what it is but its perfectly normal when wood is first submerged, sometimes it is just slimey but others there can be patches of mold on it, it doesn't cause any damage and it goes itself although sometimes wood can be slimey in a established aquarium due to algae and bacteria.

 

[minxfishy]

Its a form of algae, look horrid, isnt harmful. You could remove it and scrub it well in boiling water, but it may well come back, even so, eventually it will go away on its own.

If it happened when you had fish in, they would probably peck at it, or if you had a plec it would merrily munch on it, so do apple snails

 

[nmonks]

It's actually fungus rather than algae, but otherwise harmless. As minxfishy says, some fish and snails will happily eat the stuff. On the other hand, if there's a lot of it in your aquarium, that does imply quite a bit of decay is going on, and that in turn means oxygen is being consumed. So while the odd bit of fungus isn't anything to worry about, don't go bananas and put tonnes of green (or fresh) wood in the aquarium.

Cheers, Neale