Why does algae seem to have the ability to spontaneously generate?

Continue your experiment. Next time use the filtered water, UV sterilized in a sealed (and sterilized) tank with pure oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or other pure gas (or no gas at all, if you can manage that). Eventually you can isolate the source of the algae-genesis.

When I put plain tap water in plastic bottles that are no more than “reasonably clean” (just juice bottles rinsed with tap water), but have little or no air inside, I can store those for years with no algae formation. I think the spores are in the air, not the water. Of course, it may be the small amount of chlorine in my tap water that prevents the algae formation, but I hadn’t wondered about that until now.

@CWOTUS the water that you’re storing, I assume this is in a dark place? If I have no light on the tank, no algae. Its once the light goes on the algae grows. Obviously the light isnt putting the algae there, just allowing for photosynthesis.

Ive left factory sealed water bottles outside and they will after a while start growing algae. It does take a while though.

I wouldnt even know how to go about putting just a pure gas in for my experiment but I could go with no gas. If it is indeed in the air how do they get there in the first place? I mean its not like a mushroom that would disperse spores into the air, they’re trapped underwater.

Algae dries on receding shorelines and on objects that float and then get tossed ashore and pushed up past normal wave action. I’m sure that there’s algae in the air in the driest parts of Earth, though I couldn’t prove it right now. (That’s my hypothesis, anyway.)

You were right about the storage in the dark.

When you design your experiment, make sure that no “plain air” touches the water after it has been filtered and sterilized. Perhaps if you distilled the water and had hot steam displace all of the air that had been in the receiving flask before stoppering with a sterilized stopper, that could set up the conditions to check that the spores are airborne.

@CWOTUS good idea. I may have to wait till im back in school in two weeks to do this properly. Ill post what I find out when I do this.

All I know is that algae needs light to grow. Usually sunlight, but, artificial light must do the trick too.

I have to scrub the goose pools weekly, they develop a neon layer of algae around the edges within a matter of days of scrubbing them.

I have to do the same with a stone birdbath and a water feature on my deck.

No one deals with algae management more than I do. lol

Ah, yes, there’s another vector for spore transmission, too, @uberbatman. Guano, for lack of a politer term.

@Coloma “No one deals with algae management more than I do. lol” I do. I work in a fish store every day of work consists of cleaning algae :P

@CWOTUS Oh I know that definitely will but in my examples I have no organics

@uberbatman

What I meant was that dried guano could be a major source of algae spores in air, since we had been speculating yesterday on how it could be so widely dispersed.

@CWOTUS Ohhhh i see, I misunderstood what you were saying.

Mea culpa. I could have been clearer if I had said “vector for airborne spore transmission”.

I was thinking about this today and have come to think of another conundrum with it. If the water is RODI and UV sterilized, even if the spores get into the water how does the algae grow without any food source? I mean I know its photosynthetic but algae growth still requires phosphates and nitrates to grow which wouldnt be present in that water