Ultralife Blue Green Slime Stain Remover

I have a 10-gal tank that I suspect got seeded with this "green slime" bacteria during the addition of some new fish about six months ago. The water seemed unusually cloudy for several days and then over the next month everything steadily became covered with bright green algae-looking stuff. The tank also started to emit an earthy pond-water odor. I was periodically pulling the stuff off the tank bottom and the plants to try to keep them from being totally choked out, but I clearly needed to take more aggressive action to stop the stuff. I read a number of reviews and opinions, and this product looked like the best combination of safe and easy. The manufacturer is very vague about what it's actually made from, but it appears to be a biological extract, not a chemical or pharmaceutical compound. About three months after the suspected seeding event, I did an initial dose following more manual de-sliming. I followed the instructions carefully for the amount and process of dissolving in warm water, etc. I was hoping to see what some others had described, where the slime was clearly dying and disappearing within a few days, but after a week all I noticed was a slow yellowing in certain areas. The instructions mention re-dosing, so at that point I did a second round. The yellowing continued into a light brown, but the dead biomass never really disappeared. The fish and shrimp seemed uninterested, so apparently it doesn't taste as good as actual algae. Eventually, about a month after the initial treatment, I declared the operation complete and spent an evening rubbing dead slime off various surfaces and vacuuming up the debris. Perhaps most importantly, it hasn't returned in the couple months since, something a few others had described with frustration. In conclusion, I think this is probably the best treatment option out there, as it did stop the slime and had no apparent side effects on the fish and plants. Just beware that the die-off may occur slowly over a few weeks, and you should expect to clean up some debris after treatment. I will also mention that the instructions say to increase aeration during treatment, perhaps expecting that the decay of dead slime may deplete oxygen levels. My only aeration normally is a HOB-filter, and I didn't really want to buy a pump and air stones just for this exercise. So, I ran the initial couple weeks of treatment with the water level a couple inches low to create more splashing from the HOB waterfall. Minimizing oxygen demand was also a motivation for my thorough manual slime removal at the time of the initial dosing. Not sure which of these was more important, but I didn't have any deaths or notice other fish stress during the treatment period.

First, this product is amazing! Now read my story on why it's amazing. Trust me it works. After a long absence from the hobby of freshwater fish, my wife and I returned about a year and half ago. With a little bit of re-learning curve, the tank was doing great for a year almost. We have a happy bonded pair of EB Acara that breed regularly, a happy and large Clown Fish, several Rams and lots of Julii Cory--along with snails and other fish. It all was going so well with regular maintenance, feeding them frozen worms and brine shrimp everyday, good water quality, no lose of life, pretty live plants...our tank was awesome! Then it happened. Not sure why or how. And after HOURS of research and talking to the LPS folks, still no clearer answer was found. And nothing I did could fix this ugly Blue-Green slime covering everything in the tank. I tried it all--all the advice of experts. I did large water changes, cleaned all the plants with 3% Hydro-P and I would get the tank green free and BAM! the gross green slime would return quickly. I did everything suggested--more light, less light, new lights, more chemicals, less chemicals, more cleaning, anti-Algae treatments, less food, different food, different canister filter set-ups, and on and on (some of the attempts were pretty expensive too)... nothing worked. I mean Nothing At All. I was very close to throwing in the towel completely. Research shows the number 1 reason why people leave this hobby is Algae. That was almost me. But finally one night after giving it one more shot and looking around on the internet I discovered that it is NOT Algae after all, but instead a bacteria. Called Cyanobacteria - Blue-green Algae (but its no Algae). So armed with this new information I stumbled onto this product on the hobby blogs and looked here on Amazon and read the reviews and looked at the pictures. Shocked I saw the exact same problem in those photos that we had! So I ordered UltraLife immediately. And I'm very happy to report two weeks later it is all gone. No more Blue-Green Slime and as an added bonus my tank looks almost new again. All the live plants look healthier, the stuff in the tank looks cleaner and the sand on the bottom looks almost new again, the downed Zero is clean again. I am so thankful for this product! It actually changed my life and made me happy with the hobby that we have literally way over a thousand dollars invested in. And to think, I was about to throw it all away! As the great reviews I read here said, why this product is not on the shelf of every LPS and major pet store chain is beyond me. Another reason why I guess I do almost 90% of my shopping here on Amazon. Anyway, if you have a bright green slime that looks like green Algae, it is not and to get rid of it completely -- use this amazing product, nothing else works, trust me. I simply took a large 2 liter bottle of UV freshwater sold at the nearby chain pet store, mixed in half the powder from the little bottle of UltraLife and let that sit for a few hours. Then I poured into my 80 gallon tank. Nothing happened at all for a few days, but then I could see it working some. It was breaking down and destroying the Blue-Green slime. It almost got it all after a week, but my tank was bad off. So I did a small water change and then repeated again. The rest of the small bottle of powder in another 2 liter freshwater UV purified store bottle and into the tank after it dissolved. Now another week later it is all gone and the tank looks great! In the picture I've attached its gone. But just a short two weeks ago almost the entire bottom was covered in a really bright green slime. It was all over the plants, the downed Zero plane, and on the heater, the Co2 diffuser, the bio sponge filter, etc. -- no its completely gone! I will always have this product on hand for now on. Try it, it works and its amazing.

Worked great to remove the blue green algae. I noticed a difference after the 1st dose. After the second does 48 hours later I could not see any on the sand or plants. No harm to my fish or plants.

This product worked amazingly well! I had a serious blue-green algae/cyanobacteria problem in my aquarium and honestly thought I was going to have to completely tear down and restart my entire fish tank. I followed the directions for Ultra Life Blue-Green Slime Stain Remover, and the results were incredible. It cleared up the problem without me having to do a bunch of extra work. The only thing I really had to do was wipe down the aquarium walls afterward! My tank looks completely different, and I’m so relieved I didn’t have to start over. I was honestly skeptical that a product could make this much of a difference, but it absolutely did. If you’re struggling with blue-green slime in your aquarium, I highly recommend giving this a try. It saved my tank! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Update 11-2018: I have a feeling algae can build up a tolerance to this. Used to work but now it seems to weaken it and then the blue slime returns in about a week. Spot treatment with peroxide is about the only thing that truly kills the tough spots for me anymore. Reduced one star because it isn’t a long term solution. Original: I've had blue green slime algae show up a few times over the past six months. It usually goes away on its own, but lately it has been hanging around. The first few times I tried spot treating H2O2 but even that has stopped working. Saw this searching for another product and figured I would give it a chance. I followed the directions and treated twice. It didn't seem to do much, but after about a week... the blue green stuff has turned brown and is falling off my plant leaves. I have a 36 gal bow front with live plants, neons, rasboras, corys, ghost shrimp, and about 50 baby mystery snails and no one seems to have minded this stuff. Plenty left over for years to come. Well worth the money! Photo is around six weeks after initial dose, still no signs of blue green or red algae. I don't know what this stuff is but it works as advertised! Update: I got off track somehow with my ferts and things started to decline in my tank. Then a small patch of what looked like some sort of red algae went nuts and began to coat all of my plants. I was losing the battle and about all I could do was severely trim anything with the algae on it. Turns out it is probably the dreaded BGA or beard algae. With nothing to lose, I stopped dosing any ferts at all, stopped using Seachem Stability (which I actually think can be overdosed), and used this product 3 days in a row at 3 scoops per 36 gal tank. I also did a 5 gal water change in between each dose. Well, almost all of the BGA is disappearing so something I did worked. I honestly think it was this product that helped the most as the night after the initial dose, a lot of the BGA was starting to turn gray and die. Attached a pic of ground zero which is almost totally gone, being replaced by green algae of some sort which is much more desirable.

Took exactly a week but wiped out the BGA completely after 2 doses. Had 2 air stones running the whole time. I waited until the BGA was decaying off and did a water change. No deaths to shrimp and fish, very satisfied.

My tanks were really struggling with blue green slime. I had gotten down to 5 hours of light a day on my 10gal tank and tried increasing flow via an airstone and increasing nitrogen with a plant supplement but nothing seemed to be working. There was always a thin layer of this stuff on everything. I put in the recommended dose of this stuff. After the first 24 hours not much had changed at all, if anything. Day 2 though, SIGNIFICANT change. The BGS is still there, but it's getting stringy and "dissolving" for lack of a better word. Day 3 there's actually less of the stuff, it's gone completely from the substrate, only managing to stick around on some plants and wood. I'm giving it a full week before redosing - but this stuff works fast. The bottle is very small, but you use and extremely small amount to dose a tank, so it should be plenty unless you're working with more than 100 gallons. I have nerite snails, ramshorn snails, otocinclus, and a betta in my tank and none of them had any issue with this stuff. I would say it's plenty safe for snails and plants.

I fought with this Blue Green / Cyanobacteria for about 3 months. I followed every hot tip I could find on the web and was in the tank multiple times a day doing physical removal. The ONLY thing that worked was this product right here. I have two tanks and I lost zero fish, plants, snails, or fry. Completely dissolving the dosage takes a few minutes and it took two doses (a mere fraction of the amount of product you receive), and within the first 2 days a dramatic change happened. All the spreading stopped, the carpet layer turned brownish and was able to be siphoned out easily. 25% water change between doses and a 50% water change and thorough gravel cleaning is what i did for my results. Thank you for providing this life saver!