I bet that in most instances if you scraped or dipped some of the algae into a small container and treated it with lots of colloidal silver it would work. What is likely the case is that it would take a much greater amount of silver and it would be more effective to use one of the commercial water purifying set-ups that use silver screens to help purify the water and prevent algae. Once algae has become established it is much harder to get rid of short of strong chemicals and manual scraping/brushing.