The ugly: Thread or hair algae. Black brush algae ("BBA"). Red spot algae. These ones are heartbreakers. Left unchecked, the first two can completely fill a tank, choking out all plant life completely. The red spot algae is just plain ugly and virtually impossible to remove even with a razor blade.
Some people claim to be able to keep them under control with proper fertilization while others swear by rosy barbs, florida flag fish, various algae eating shrimp and Siamese algae eaters. Bully for them I say, but these have never worked for me and even if they did I'm not really interested in controlling them, I want them dead, eradicated, gone, fini, pushing up daisies. And there's only one way to do that. Algicide won't work, it's ineffective against this stuff.
You can get infected by these nasty beasts by feeding live food from a pond or by receiving plants from somebody who has the stuff. Even if the plants you get look ok it only takes one lousy cell to infest your tank.
The cure for this is not pretty, it does not smell nice and it's a lot of work. But it does do the trick, and once you've eradicated the stuff you'll want to quarantine everything coming in to prevent re-infestation, and I mean everything. One cell, just one lousy cell and you've got a problem again.
The cure: bleach. No kidding. Household bleach. Increadable as it may seem, your delicate looking aquatic plants can actually withstand being bleached, although they will lose likely drop some or all of their leaves - especially the more tender plants such as Crypts - but they will regenerate. I've never seen bleach kill a plant outright.
You'll need one part household bleach to nineteen parts water. Place this in a bucket, immerse the plants in it fully, then rinse the plants thoroughly in fresh water. Adding some chlorine remover wouldn't be a bad idea although I never bothered with it. Most plants can take about 2.5 minutes of this. The tougher the plant the longer it can take. The aquatic ferns and mosses seem to suffer the worst, tough plants like Anubias you'd swear can grow in the stuff. Algae may nto be bothered by diesel fuel, but bleach turns it white almost instantly.
Sounds horrendous, I know, but once you've done it it doesn't seem that bad. Of course this is just the beginning. Remember you have to kill every cell of the wretched stuff so the tank itself must be bleached, and this is probably better done if it's completely drained; rather than 2 minutes with a dilute solution of bleach you're probably better off wiping it down with full strength bleach. Note that you will want to wear rubber gloves and goggles to protect your eyes while you're doing all this. The gravel or whatever you use as substrate must be bleached. Filters, nets, ornaments, heaters must be bleached. Did you ever touch your doorknob with hands wet from a tank infested with thread algae? Bleach it. Remember: one cell is all it takes. Bleach everything.
Obviously you can't bleach your fish - well, ok, you can but they won't survive - but they will have filaments of thread algae in their gills and in their gut. The thing to do with them is put them in another (sterilized) tank with little or no water movement and fairly course gravel. The algal cells will fall into the gravel - 3 days of this and they'll be safe to introduce into your now algae free tank.
Snails are the hardest to deal with. They'll actually survive bleach in many cases because they'll close up their shell and keep the bleach out. Of course they'll holding algal filament laden water up inside their shell and will re-infect your tank as soon as they're put back in. So, your options here are to obtain new snails that are unquestionably algae free or to put them in a small tank with some course gravel and black it out and leave them there for about 3 months. You'll never be able to purge your snails of algae but their offspring will be ok. You can feed them one piece of dry cat-food once a week or so. If you have Malaysian live bearing snails in your tank you probably will need to just get new gravel. You'll never get all those snails out and each one will have thread algae filaments in them. It's probably best to clean your snails 3 months before you tear down and bleach your tank so you have clean snails for it when it's ready.
Yes, it's a lot of work. But it really is the only way to eradicate, not just control, the most ugly forms of algae.

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