You Know How I Get Rid of Duckweed?

Very very carefully ;-) hahahaha!

No, seriously... I hate this stuff. Ugh. So I found this video on how to get that crap out of your tank. Granted, it's not the BEST way to do it, but it's certainly the least amount of work... unless you have a wet/dry vacuum. Or a goldfish. Hah!

Anyway...

Nice video, would work well if no other floating plants. I actually just started going to town on my duckweed problem, but I have frogbit and red root floaters in the same tank, which cover about 80% of the surface alone. Got about six spoonfuls of it out tonight, about 1/10 of it lol. Used a plastic spoon and a cup to throw it in. Keep some water in the cup to wash off the spoon. Literally "Rinse & Repeat"

I like to use a small goldfish. They'll eventually eat it all

Thanks Poke, gonna use this on a smaller scale in a 30 gallon to clean up the duck weed.

Duckweed removal from a tank with shrimp and other floaters is a giant pain in the asteroid.  You can't use a fancy mechanism like the one in the video because you'll end up collecting shrimp as well.  You can't use a goldfish because they'll eat the shrimp too.

The way I got rid of my duckweed was a long, drawn-out process whereby I removed every speck of it manually every week for about 6 weeks straight - from all of my tanks.  This involved splashing water up under the rims of the tanks since this is where the reserve duckweed army lives, as well as removing and manually rinsing all larger floaters.  If you have glass covers, these need to be pulled and scrubbed to remove every bit of duckweed.  Cords for heaters and pumps as well as airlines need to be cleaned as well.  And make sure the top side of rims are also clean - this stuff can get back in the tank pretty easily.

Once you have the bulk of it out after the first sweep, you remove every speck you can find every week for several more weeks (it's not generally necessary to re-rinse the floaters after the first pass) - making sure you splash water up under the rims every time.

A single, desiccated, dried-out duckweed leaf can spawn a new army.

pbmax: that's actually what I'm doing with my 20 long, although, I never really had an outbreak, but I did notice some pieces of duckweed here and there, so I've been using tweezers to manually remove each speck I see. It's so much easier to remove with tweezers, than to remove with your hands, or a cup, etc. And yeah, I've been checking every night before heading to bed. I usually only find about 10 pieces or so, not so bad.

That tank has a bunch of shrimp and little guppy fry, so I can't use the mechanical filter approach, HOWEVER... I just thought it was pretty clever, regardless

I use a fluval shrimp net for removal of bits here and there; it works pretty well.

Indeed, the mechanism is pretty cool, for folks that don't have anything on the surface of the water other than duckweed.

Now I need to figure out a way to get rid of the dreaded watermeal. Without adding larger fish that would eat it (and my shrimp), of course. I have the stuff in nearly every one of my tanks. Thankfully it's not as problematic as duckweed, but it's a pain.

I have a small diameter tube that is just a bit too small for this, but what I like to do it use it as a siphon, and suck up each piece of duckweed through that. It's probably a lot more work, but I have other floating plants that get duckweed stuck in them, so I have to very very precise to get rid of all of it. I have almost succeeded on my 20high, I think I will do one more sweep today to try and get the rest of it.

That filter is a neat idea though, my roommate's cheap aboveground pool has a similar attachment for its exterior filter, where water tumbles in over the sides like that and creates extra surface tension/flow. It reminds me of this:

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SPILLWAY TO THE ABYSS! These things creep the hell out of me, imagine you were swimming in a lake and all of a sudden, "AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" down the hole you go. Duckweed deserves this fate, though; it has stuck to the arms of thousands of fishkeepers and justice must be satisfied!

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SPILLWAY TO THE ABYSS! These things creep the hell out of me, imagine you were swimming in a lake and all of a sudden, "AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" down the hole you go. Duckweed deserves this fate, though; it has stuck to the arms of thousands of fishkeepers and justice must be satisfied!

That made my day. This is what I think of whenever I drain duckweed out of my duckweed tanks :)There are few things more gratifying than watching a big batch of duckweed drain straight down the hole to perdition

Festivums LOVE duckweed!!!!

So, I had some time to kill while working at Aquarium Co-Op today, and I figured I'd try and make myself a duckweed sucker upper, just like the one in the video I posted in my first post. Well, here are my results.

PokeSephiroth wrote:So, I had some time to kill while working at Aquarium Co-Op today, and I figured I'd try and make myself a duckweed sucker upper, just like the one in the video I posted in my first post. Well, here are my results.

EPIC!!!! Best part is you could walk away ant let it run for a week till you were sure it was all gone. My question is will other floating plantsstop at the rim?

Chisaii: Yes, the plants will stop at the rim, because the time of the bottle has little grooved "slits" that are big enough for the duckweed to fall through, while keeping bigger floating plants around the rim. HOWEVER.... if the rim starts getting bogged down with too many larger floating plants, they end up blocking the slits, and then just causes the duckweed to clump up near the pump, but not go into the bottle.