Garbage Disposals

So I am starting a fish tank again but this time I am doing a community tank to try something different. For those of you who don't know what a community tank is it mean that the fish in the tank are of different species as opposed to a species tank which has all the same species in the tank. Most freshwater tanks are community tanks unless they are a breeding tank for a certain kind of fish or a Cichlid tank.

Back to my tank, I am putting pieces together at a time because of being a college student and not having a lot of money I can put towards it. I have had the filter running for a couple of weeks and last week i put some wood in there that I might use as part of my hardscape (wood and rock decoration layout) so that it can soak and hopefully sink on it's own by the time I'm ready for plants.

Well yesterday I noticed some algae growing on the wood. I wanted to get something to take care of the algae but that didn't need much care or i wouldn't be to upset about if it died since I didn't have everything setup yet. So I decided to get some ghost shrimp thinking they would take care of the algae. After putting them in the tank (acclimating them first of course) I watched them for a while and they didn't seem interested in the algae on the wood. So I decided to do some reading and it turns out shrimp don't eat algae they are just garbage disposals. They pick up what food (in any form) isn't consumed by the other inhabitants of the tank.

So now I have ghost shrimp and algae. I did some more reading and found out the type of algae I have commonly grows on wood when it's first put in water. There is some debate as to what eats this particular algae if anything does. It seems that water changes and time are the best way to get rid of it (it looks like a white beard algae). So now I have algae that will last for a while and go away and ghost shrimp. At least this gives me something to look at until I can start getting fish!