What is killing all my SPS?

[GP0801]

In my case they hung around until the 4th month. All I did was blast them daily and fed heavy, reef roids helped with po4. I also used live phyto (not sure if it helped) I was tired of fighting, so I stopped and it worked it self out after about a month. I had zoas, a hammer, and an acan all survive just fine.

Perfect thats good to know. I'll cut out the dino x then and just try to keep maintaining it daily. I was considering getting some Phyto and Pods for a more natural approach. It's unfortunate that I can't do anything more for the SPS though.

 

[Little c big D]

Perfect thats good to know. I'll cut out the dino x then and just try to keep maintaining it daily. I was considering getting some Phyto and Pods for a more natural approach. It's unfortunate that I can't do anything more for the SPS though.

You can always try. If the frags still have life putting them on a rack in direct high flow can help keep the dinos from taking them over. And if you notice any snot build up from the dinos you can baste it off. I can't say it will work but it absolutley could!

 

[GP0801]

Sorry you lost those two nice pieces. At three months that was kinda a long shot unless it was a live rock insta-tank upgrade situation. Best to start out with some cheap slimer. * edit I see you did that*

It was not the dinos that killed the tenuis it was the lack of available ammonia (consumable precursor to nitrite/nitrate) and bacteria laden PO4. More fish poop pleased.

You did well to dose nutrient back up quickly. Now it is the waiting game while the population of surface competitors rebuilds.

What is your fish population?

Yeah I knew it was a risk so end of the day I did know what I was getting myself into. To be totally honest I got both frags for under $200 from a good friend of mine so it was hard to resist. I figured why not try, crazy thing is the tenuis outlasted the slimer by quite a bit. I definitely do think I could use a few more fish though. As of now all I have in there are a clownfish pair, a purple firefish and a tail spot blenny.

I'm moving in roughly three weeks so I didn't want to get more fish and risk moving them. I'm also getting a bigger tank for my next house so I thought I'd add more fish once moved.

 

[ScottB]

Yeah I knew it was a risk so end of the day I did know what I was getting myself into. To be totally honest I got both frags for under $200 from a good friend of mine so it was hard to resist. I figured why not try, crazy thing is the tenuis outlasted the slimer by quite a bit. I definitely do think I could use a few more fish though. As of now all I have in there are a clownfish pair, a purple firefish and a tail spot blenny.

I'm moving in roughly three weeks so I didn't want to get more fish and risk moving them. I'm also getting a bigger tank for my next house so I thought I'd add more fish once moved.

In the long run, a good fish load and suitable export is what is best for SPS. I believe the natural symbiosis there is greatly underappreciated.

In the short run -- absent a lot of mature rock -- acropora can be hit miss for sure.

Good luck with the move.

 

[Lavey29]

Well the chemicals were just a response to the dying corals. I wanted to let it run it's course but I realized if I didnt do something they were dead regardless so I started dosing nitrates and phosphates.

You are right to dose nitrates and phosphate to get your numbers up. I had to double dose both for multiple weeks to get my numbers up and have the tank start to get back in balance. As others mentioned, it's probably close to a year before SPS will react positively in a new tank if everything else is balanced. My tank is 9 months old. I put a free SPS frag in of purple stylo. It's still alive but not looking that well at all so I'm going to wait some months and try again.

 

[GP0801]

You are right to dose nitrates and phosphate to get your numbers up. I had to double dose both for multiple weeks to get my numbers up and have the tank start to get back in balance. As others mentioned, it's probably close to a year before SPS will react positively in a new tank if everything else is balanced. My tank is 9 months old. I put a free SPS frag in of purple stylo. It's still alive but not looking that well at all so I'm going to wait some months and try again.

Yeah I've noticed that nitrates are starting to hold above 10 now without dosing but phosphates aren't getting any better for now, I'm still dosing daily. I knew the general rule of thumb was 1 year but I'm just an impatient person. Saw a few random posts that said they've had SPS thrive in 1 month old tanks so I thought I might get lucky too. Regardless I knew odds were against me so its no biggie, I was just hoping there might have been something more I could do. I'll just stick to the LPS for now then.

 

[Lavey29]

Yeah I've noticed that nitrates are starting to hold above 10 now without dosing but phosphates aren't getting any better for now, I'm still dosing daily. I knew the general rule of thumb was 1 year but I'm just an impatient person. Saw a few random posts that said they've had SPS thrive in 1 month old tanks so I thought I might get lucky too. Regardless I knew odds were against me so its no biggie, I was just hoping there might have been something more I could do. I'll just stick to the LPS for now then.

With live ocean rocks maybe

 

[Aqua Juice Corals]

From your stickys, it looks like you're testing every day and hand dosing. If this is correct, and you'd like to preserve your sanity (we've all been there), get a good doser and work on stablizing the curves using your doser -- here's a good example:

Best Tank App????

aquarimate looks cool but i dont want to pull the trigger for 10 bucks if it crashes and cant take pics of your tank(along with other bugs)...anyone on it that can tell me if they fixed the functionality? Take the freebie my man. It is just as good and o haven't ran into any bugs. Everything I...

www.reef2reef.com

Be patient, smooth out the things we can measure -- and let the biology run its course until that's stable too. Unfortunately we can't effectively monitor the bacterial and other tank biology, which is why everyone advises system maturity. 3 months is starter mode! So actually the "hard" chemical parameters are only a basic foundation (which you are monitoring well with great effort, kudos). The "advanced mode" is striving for bio-maturity and bio-stability. That's when harder to keep corals like SPS will do well. In the long term, you'll need the help of automatic dosers and the like.

The comment on dumping chems in, yes, it may well disrupt your curve to bio-maturity. Just take the SPS losses as sign posts on your way to a good tank, it happens to everyone. Teflon time!

 

[ScottB]

Yeah I've noticed that nitrates are starting to hold above 10 now without dosing but phosphates aren't getting any better for now, I'm still dosing daily. I knew the general rule of thumb was 1 year but I'm just an impatient person. Saw a few random posts that said they've had SPS thrive in 1 month old tanks so I thought I might get lucky too. Regardless I knew odds were against me so its no biggie, I was just hoping there might have been something more I could do. I'll just stick to the LPS for now then.

The phosphates are binding to your rock and sand so just keep going. At some point they will saturate to equal the PO4 level in the water and you will be able to stop dosing. I was dosing into a large system and it took about 2 liters of DIY before it said "cool. we are good here."

 

[TheDragonsReef]

So the pictures are very blue making it hard to tell for sure but it looks like cyano bacteria to me, but the way you descibe how it came about does sound like dinos. Can you take some pictures under white light to help us id?

Dinos are a huge pain to get rid of and certain species are very toxic to corals. Youre on the right track with dosing nutrients. Live phyto, dosing competing bacteria and a uv light helped with mine alot.

With cyano, its not necessarily toxic but tends to smother corals and starve them of light. For treatment sometimes just syphoning what you can out manually then doing a chemiclean treatment and upping the flow is enough when your nutrients are good like they are now.

But so far youve been taking the right steps in addressing the issue, nuisance algaes can be a pain and wont go away overnight. Keep at it, be patient and im sure youll beat them. Try to keep as much away from the corals as you can.

 

[TnFishwater98]

Yeah I've noticed that nitrates are starting to hold above 10 now without dosing but phosphates aren't getting any better for now, I'm still dosing daily. I knew the general rule of thumb was 1 year but I'm just an impatient person. Saw a few random posts that said they've had SPS thrive in 1 month old tanks so I thought I might get lucky too. Regardless I knew odds were against me so its no biggie, I was just hoping there might have been something more I could do. I'll just stick to the LPS for now then.

Yea tank is probably not mature yet. You might of had a chance if you used real LR but that would still be pushing it at 3 months. Patients will be your best strategy. Be cautious of all the dosing, it can send you on a roller coaster ride of water parameters problems. I’m definitely not a expert but have read many horror story threads of people’s bad experiences.

 

[GP0801]

From your stickys, it looks like you're testing every day and hand dosing. If this is correct, and you'd like to preserve your sanity (we've all been there), get a good doser and work on stablizing the curves using your doser -- here's a good example:

Best Tank App????

aquarimate looks cool but i dont want to pull the trigger for 10 bucks if it crashes and cant take pics of your tank(along with other bugs)...anyone on it that can tell me if they fixed the functionality? Take the freebie my man. It is just as good and o haven't ran into any bugs. Everything I...

www.reef2reef.com

Be patient, smooth out the things we can measure -- and let the biology run its course until that's stable too. Unfortunately we can't effectively monitor the bacterial and other tank biology, which is why everyone advises system maturity. 3 months is starter mode! So actually the "hard" chemical parameters are only a basic foundation (which you are monitoring well with great effort, kudos). The "advanced mode" is striving for bio-maturity and bio-stability. That's when harder to keep corals like SPS will do well. In the long term, you'll need the help of automatic dosers and the like.

The comment on dumping chems in, yes, it may well disrupt your curve to bio-maturity. Just take the SPS losses as sign posts on your way to a good tank, it happens to everyone. Teflon time!

Yes I'm doing it all by hand but this is a smaller tank so it's not as bad but the testing is a bit exhausting. I do plan on getting a doser but not for this tank. I plan on ordering a Reefer 750 once I move in a few weeks so I'll be getting the fancy equipment for that tank. I guess I really underestimated the importance of bio-maturity, I thought if I kept Alk, Cal and Mag at good levels everything would be fine, clearly not the case. Thanks for the detailed response.

The phosphates are binding to your rock and sand so just keep going. At some point they will saturate to equal the PO4 level in the water and you will be able to stop dosing. I was dosing into a large system and it took about 2 liters of DIY before it said "cool. we are good here."

Sounds good to me, I'll keep an eye on things daily until everything stabilizes.

So the pictures are very blue making it hard to tell for sure but it looks like cyano bacteria to me, but the way you descibe how it came about does sound like dinos. Can you take some pictures under white light to help us id?

Dinos are a huge pain to get rid of and certain species are very toxic to corals. Youre on the right track with dosing nutrients. Live phyto, dosing competing bacteria and a uv light helped with mine alot.

With cyano, its not necessarily toxic but tends to smother corals and starve them of light. For treatment sometimes just syphoning what you can out manually then doing a chemiclean treatment and upping the flow is enough when your nutrients are good like they are now.

But so far youve been taking the right steps in addressing the issue, nuisance algaes can be a pain and wont go away overnight. Keep at it, be patient and im sure youll beat them. Try to keep as much away from the corals as you can.

Wow I actually haven't had any white light on in a very long time because I know the dinos grow much better with white light but this looks so much more disgusting. Also my first time seeing all this green stuff on the rock, must be another type of algae that is growing now. I used the turkey baster this morning to clean the stuff off the corals and you can see how much it accumulates in just a few hours.

Yea tank is probably not mature yet. You might of had a chance if you used real LR but that would still be pushing it at 3 months. Patients will be your best strategy. Be cautious of all the dosing, it can send you on a roller coaster ride of water parameters problems. I’m definitely not a expert but have read many horror story threads of people’s bad experiences.

Yeah that seems to be the general consensus. No problem, seems like its just a dosing and waiting game then. I'll let nature take it's course. I may start dosing phyto as well just to add some diversity.

 

[ScottB]

Yes I'm doing it all by hand but this is a smaller tank so it's not as bad but the testing is a bit exhausting. I do plan on getting a doser but not for this tank. I plan on ordering a Reefer 750 once I move in a few weeks so I'll be getting the fancy equipment for that tank. I guess I really underestimated the importance of bio-maturity, I thought if I kept Alk, Cal and Mag at good levels everything would be fine, clearly not the case. Thanks for the detailed response.



Sounds good to me, I'll keep an eye on things daily until everything stabilizes.



Wow I actually haven't had any white light on in a very long time because I know the dinos grow much better with white light but this looks so much more disgusting. Also my first time seeing all this green stuff on the rock, must be another type of algae that is growing now. I used the turkey baster this morning to clean the stuff off the corals and you can see how much it accumulates in just a few hours.



Yeah that seems to be the general consensus. No problem, seems like its just a dosing and waiting game then. I'll let nature take it's course. I may start dosing phyto as well just to add some diversity.

If the light green stuff blows off sheet-like, it is green cyano. Otherwise it is a film algae. Despite appearances, either are fine transitions right now. They will outcompete dinos for space. Eventually they give way to other films like bacteria, then coralline. Maybe some space to GHA early in the uglies. No worries.

The brown stuff looks like dinos; lets see what the microscope shows. Take two separate samples: one from the top area plastics, the other from the sand. Not uncommon to have >1 species.

I'll link you to this now so you have something to chew on while you wait for the microscope. There will be a quiz after

A Dinoflagellate Treatment Guide

docs.google.com

 

[TheDragonsReef]

Wow I actually haven't had any white light on in a very long time because I know the dinos grow much better with white light but this looks so much more disgusting. Also my first time seeing all this green stuff on the rock, must be another type of algae that is growing now. I used the turkey baster this morning to clean the stuff off the corals and you can see how much it accumulates in just a few hours.

You for sure have dinos so you were correct. Looks like ostreopsis and possibly another species mixed in at the sand level. Ostreos are what i dealt with and theyre the worst and most toxic to corals. They wiped 75% of my corals and all of my sps when i got them. Took me 4 months to get rid of them.

 

[GP0801]

If the light green stuff blows off sheet-like, it is green cyano. Otherwise it is a film algae. Despite appearances, either are fine transitions right now. They will outcompete dinos for space. Eventually they give way to other films like bacteria, then coralline. Maybe some space to GHA early in the uglies. No worries.

The brown stuff looks like dinos; lets see what the microscope shows. Take two separate samples: one from the top area plastics, the other from the sand. Not uncommon to have >1 species.

I'll link you to this now so you have something to chew on while you wait for the microscope. There will be a quiz after

A Dinoflagellate Treatment Guide

docs.google.com

Well I got the microscope but either I'm not using this right or it's definitely not capable of the 1000x magnification they advertised. These were the best pictures I was able to get of them, not sure if they're helpful to ID or not. I also took a read through that treatment guide to try to ID myself, I feel like based on what I can see it's probably Ostreo or Amphidinium. Their shapes are pretty similar but I got a video and it did look like they swim in circles like Ostreo.

You for sure have dinos so you were correct. Looks like ostreopsis and possibly another species mixed in at the sand level. Ostreos are what i dealt with and theyre the worst and most toxic to corals. They wiped 75% of my corals and all of my sps when i got them. Took me 4 months to get rid of them.

Did they end up hurting your LPS corals as well?

 

[jda]

You are going to need to decide on a path forward. Having low building blocks is not what causes dinos to come, it is a lack of other things on surfaces that allow them to gain a foothold. I have P of 1-3 ppb and N of about .1 and I have no appreciable dinos, cyano or diatoms in my tank. However, I have no sterile/new surfaces for them to attach to. Every tank can get a quarter or half-dollar sized patch of something every now and again, but they go as fast as they come and are no problem - there is no way to keep this stuff out of your tank.

By dosing N and P, you are trying to poison them. I am conflicted on if this works long term since you can poison other things too, but those often look small when you just want dinos gone. I can say that you are filling your rock and sand up with phosphate which one day you might wish that you did not. I would strongly contemplate this before you add too much more phosphate.

It seems that like many others, you are paying the price of a sterile tank startup.

You probably need to choose if you want to manage all of this, like you have been, or let nature do it. I strongly suggest the natural route. If you decide to go this way, it is a great long term decision. I would order a small kit of real live rock from Florida or the Pacific, cure it (or whatever), and wait for a month for it to populate the rest of the tank with good stuff. This usually cuts down cycles and the ugly phase to nearly nothing.

If you added too much P already, then you might need to bring it back down so that some of the awesome critters on the rocks can live - some of the inverts, worm, pods, starfish, etc. thrive with N and P closer to NSW levels. Some does not seem to hurt them too much, but you want them to thrive, repopulate and get everywhere.

 

[TheDragonsReef]

You are going to need to decide on a path forward. Having low building blocks is not what causes dinos to come, it is a lack of other things on surfaces that allow them to gain a foothold. I have P of 1-3 ppb and N of about .1 and I have no appreciable dinos, cyano or diatoms in my tank. However, I have no sterile/new surfaces for them to attach to. Every tank can get a quarter or half-dollar sized patch of something every now and again, but they go as fast as they come and are no problem - there is no way to keep this stuff out of your tank.

By dosing N and P, you are trying to poison them. I am conflicted on if this works long term since you can poison other things too, but those often look small when you just want dinos gone. I can say that you are filling your rock and sand up with phosphate which one day you might wish that you did not. I would strongly contemplate this before you add too much more phosphate.

It seems that like many others, you are paying the price of a sterile tank startup.

You probably need to choose if you want to manage all of this, like you have been, or let nature do it. I strongly suggest the natural route. If you decide to go this way, it is a great long term decision. I would order a small kit of real live rock from Florida or the Pacific, cure it (or whatever), and wait for a month for it to populate the rest of the tank with good stuff. This usually cuts down cycles and the ugly phase to nearly nothing.

If you added too much P already, then you might need to bring it back down so that some of the awesome critters on the rocks can live - some of the inverts, worm, pods, starfish, etc. thrive with N and P closer to NSW levels. Some does not seem to hurt them too much, but you want them to thrive, repopulate and get everywhere.

Dosing phosphate to 0.1 wont cause any long term problems. My phosphates in my sps tank stay therr consistently. But with dinos you cannot sit back and do nothing. They will kill everything in the tank.

 

[TheDragonsReef]

Well I got the microscope but either I'm not using this right or it's definitely not capable of the 1000x magnification they advertised. These were the best pictures I was able to get of them, not sure if they're helpful to ID or not. I also took a read through that treatment guide to try to ID myself, I feel like based on what I can see it's probably Ostreo or Amphidinium. Their shapes are pretty similar but I got a video and it did look like they swim in circles like Ostreo.



Did they end up hurting your LPS corals as well?

They didn't kill any lps but they definitely didn't like them either. They were hurting.

 

[SlugSnorter]

So basically you have unstable parameters with nutrients bottomed out in a 3 month old tank that you are now dropping a bunch of chemicals in to fix a dino outbreak?

And you wonder why your SPS are dying?

exactly! idk what you can do. OP your tank is nowhere near ready for SPS especially the sensitive stuff

 

[GP0801]

You are going to need to decide on a path forward. Having low building blocks is not what causes dinos to come, it is a lack of other things on surfaces that allow them to gain a foothold. I have P of 1-3 ppb and N of about .1 and I have no appreciable dinos, cyano or diatoms in my tank. However, I have no sterile/new surfaces for them to attach to. Every tank can get a quarter or half-dollar sized patch of something every now and again, but they go as fast as they come and are no problem - there is no way to keep this stuff out of your tank.

By dosing N and P, you are trying to poison them. I am conflicted on if this works long term since you can poison other things too, but those often look small when you just want dinos gone. I can say that you are filling your rock and sand up with phosphate which one day you might wish that you did not. I would strongly contemplate this before you add too much more phosphate.

It seems that like many others, you are paying the price of a sterile tank startup.

You probably need to choose if you want to manage all of this, like you have been, or let nature do it. I strongly suggest the natural route. If you decide to go this way, it is a great long term decision. I would order a small kit of real live rock from Florida or the Pacific, cure it (or whatever), and wait for a month for it to populate the rest of the tank with good stuff. This usually cuts down cycles and the ugly phase to nearly nothing.

If you added too much P already, then you might need to bring it back down so that some of the awesome critters on the rocks can live - some of the inverts, worm, pods, starfish, etc. thrive with N and P closer to NSW levels. Some does not seem to hurt them too much, but you want them to thrive, repopulate and get everywhere.

I didn't think I was poisoning anything, from my understanding all the guides say to dose nitrate and phosphate so that competing algae has fuel to grow and outcompete the dinos.

They didn't kill any lps but they definitely didn't like them either. They were hurting.

Sounds good, I think the ship has sailed on the SPS but hopefully I can keep the LPS alive.