Filamentous Algae in Your Pond

We usually put man made ponds in our landscape to make a fresher look in the overall expression of your lawn or your garden. It is such a nice view if you can see clean water streaming with a lot of fish and aquatic plants inhabiting it. If you can notice, sometimes there are some things that make your pond murky or polluted. These things that make you pond ugly are called filamentous algae. Actually, filamentous algae do not cause the green coloration of the water in the pond. The things that make pond water green are the planktonic algae. They usually float on the surface of the water.

Filamentous algae is often composed of strands of cells that usually form a long strings. We usually call filamentous algae blanket weed, long string algae, moss, pond scum, and a lot more. Filamentous algae are more common in spring time, where the temperature can be pretty warm. For those part of the world where in it's almost warm all year round, filamentous algae can cause them some problem.

In the history of pond maintenance, it is a fact that filamentous algae is the most common aquatic weed problem encountered. The mere presence of the filamentous algae can seriously reduce the quality of the pond water. If there are a lot of filamentous algae in your pond, they can cause reduce the amount of oxygen in a very alarming rate, that may result to the death of the organisms inhabiting the pond, especially the fish, because filamentous algae decomposes as a result of natural die-off or sometimes, herbicide application. If we can regulate the population of filamentous algae in our pond early and in regularly, we can lessen the problems that are usually caused by the filamentous algae, also known as the pond nuisance.

We have to be wary on how filamentous algae can reach our ponds. They commonly come with the rain, or in the tap water or sometimes with the wind. We also have to be alert because filamentous algae can reach our pond if they attached themselves to the aquatic plants that we put in our ponds. They alsogrow alarmingly fast, especially is they have more than enough sunlight and nutrients.

Despite of all the negative things that we can tackle about the filamentous algae, we also have to give them some credits for the other benefits that we can get from them. Even if they make our ponds ugly, filamentous algae can be beneficial for they keep out of over growth of planktonic algae. This is possible since planktonic algae and filamentous algae consume the same kind of nutrients. Since there is a competition, it will lessen the chance of the survival of the other one. So we can say the filamentous alage acts as a biological filtration in the pond water. Though filamentous algae is helpful in controlling the number of planktoni algae, it is still not recommended to let filamentous algae over populate in your pond, because they can still cause serious problems like suffocating small fish or strangling the good plants in our pond.

So to make sure things will not go out of hand, we have to control the filamentous algae. There are actually several algae treatments. The first and immediate method that people usually do is the physical way, where in we have to tediously harvest the algae with a rake or with a stick. Another method is by putting a lot of good plants that will compete with the nutrients that they need for survival. Water hyacinth and water lilies are the common plants used in this method.

Filamentous algae can be both beneficial or nuisance in our pond. We just have to make sure that we can control their growth and their population.