Woohooo no more staghorn in my tank. It wasn't an easy task, but heck it's worth it. No more ugly clumps of greenish grey stuff smothering everything. Here's how I did it, if anyone facing the same algae. I manually remove all the algae I can see, followed by waterchange. During waterchange, i'd look for algae floating around and suck it all up. I also 'vacuumed' the plants with the siphon to suck up more algae still sticking to them. I did this 3 days in a row, and there were still some staghorn in there, the short short ones on the glosso. The plants really covered with the stuff and hard to remove by hand, I dip in ocean free algae remover. I had this clump of narrow leaf microsorum covered with staghorn, I dipped it for one night, the staghorn become light green/blue and they slowly die off. a week later there's no algae in sight! I have pond snails(physa), yamato, oto, flying fox and rosy barbs in there. They could've helped eat some. The snails were the only ones I saw really grazing on them.

How concentrated was your dip?

Erm, I didn't measure the dose, but I did put quite a bit in there. Enough to see the water turn milky white. My microsorum wasn't affected by it. But microsorum is a tough plant. I did not dose any of the algae remover directly into my tank.. afraid it might kill my shrimp. I would be careful about dosing this on fragile plants like pellia and crypts though. You've been warned!

I should also mention that small manual removal of this algae is useless. I struggled with this algae for AGES that way. It will grow back very very quickly. You need to shock and awe the buggers into submission. I've searched endlessly on the web and forums for a good guide to remove these guys.. I couldn't find one. So this is straight from trial and success! Need to remove every single speck you can see, and water changes i made was 40-50%. While sucking out water... I also suck up every bit of the algae I can see floating around. No mercy!! Once it goes into remission and weakens its grip, it slowly dissapears. I dunno if it dissapeared by itself or my critters ate some, and I dunno why my critters didn't eat them up before I perform this routine. maybe they got too thick and tough to eat. Mystery to me.