Spring is coming. Spring is here. The days are lengthening, time change has come. We have already adjusted our lives to it. Your fish are starting to demand more food and the pond temperature has raised enough that you are going to give more feedings to them. The filter is waking up, stretching, starting to deal with the excess nutrients in the pond. The last of the autumn leaves you didn’t quite get out, the drifting spring blooms that are coming from the neighbor’s yard, the dead hyacinth roots being shed with the new growth.
But along with those excess nutrients comes the burgeoning hair algae growth. Suddenly, over night it seems, the pond goes from clear and perfect to bearded along its edges with the growth of the hair (or string) algae.
The nutrients, mostly, are what has encouraged that growth. Nutrients and warmer temperatures. And while there are multiple ways of dealing with algae growth, count its appearance as a good thing within your pond.
We all had basic Biology 101 back in high school. How higher life forms are more efficient at the use of nutrients than lower. So consider that hair algae is using the nutrients that would otherwise be taken up by pea soup or free floating algae. Hair algae is just a little easier to control.
Every new pond goes through a bout with pea soup algae. Which frequently clears up over night a few weeks to a few months after the pond is established. Pea soup algae does not hurt the fish, but it makes them harder to see -- both for the predators and us as owners who spent money on the *#&*@@#* things and want to see them. Besides, clear water is the sign of being a good pond keeper, right? and we don’t want to be regarded as failures.
Enter the string algae. The sides of a new pond soon get a velvety coating of short algae. In the spring this may lengthen into hair algae. Whether string algae is a longer form is immaterial. Hair algae in unsightly. The shorter is invisible except to the touch and is desirable. Fish munch on the short variety. It helps with the Oxygen levels in the pond during the day, aids the filter in using up nitrites and nitrates and ammonia from the fish.
But the string algae can do even more. Along with making more of a meal for the fish, its very length creates a waving haven for spawning koi eggs. The only spawning I ever had that actually hatched was one year when the algae was so very long some of the eggs evaded being served as mid afternoon caviar.
However, let’s go back to the Biology 101 for a moment. At a recent meeting, Norm Meck announced that dried string algae had its uses in water clarification. Just like Barley Straw.
I have never quite figured out how Barley straw worked at water clarification. Its presence puts decomposing nutrients in the water, doesn’t it? Adding, not clarifying.
Well, not exactly. In Biology 101 we learned that to add a bit of straw to fresh water eventually caused a bloom of protozoa, which we were cheerfully then given to observe under the microscope. Protozoa, like krill, have to feed on something, and that something, apparently is free floating algae. Dried Hair algae gives the same effect. Harvest your algae, dry it thoroughly to the yellowish grayish tan and then dunk it back into the pond.
While not as dynamic as a well functioning filter, it certainly is cheaper and safer than commercial algicides. which are rarely safe for our fish. We with our koi ponds tend to have enormous filters on the ponds for the health of the fish. But consider the lowly hair algae. Cheap, available, and, best of all, (sorry for the pun) GREEN.