Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods

[awais98]

@taricha @Beardo
So Ive had my Zeovit tank running for 1.5 year now, had a LOT of high end sps, they were really beginning to catch speed grwing. and then came the dino..... battling for past 2 months....tried some routine mthdo, peroxide, dino x, lights, temp, nothing helped. LOST 90% of my expensive sps
Today I tried to ID the dino:
seems to me amphidium: here are the microscope pic at 100X
what do I do? Please help.

 

[taricha]

LOST 90% of my expensive sps
Today I tried to ID the dino:
seems to me amphidium: here are the microscope pic at 100X
what do I do? Please help.

This is ostreopsis. Check mcarroll's main dino thread for details. It's well controlled by those methods.

 

[awais98]

This is ostreopsis. Check mcarroll's main dino thread for details. It's well controlled by those methods.

Read through the forums,
Before I do anything more, just few sps are left I want to be sure what I have to do.
Please guide
Thank you

 

[taricha]

Responded about ostreopsis in the other thread.
Some people occasionally ask for source of pods / inverts that'll graze dinos.

This looks like what I'd buy if I were buying grazers to help eat dinos, diatoms etc.
Florida pets - live pods

http://floridapets.com/epages/047c0...adee/Categories/Live_Products/Live_Foods/Pods

"Lately, we have found that our pod portions have contained mostly amphipods. You will likely also see a few isopods and a few assorted other creatures such as: skeleton shrimp, tiny feather duster worms, small sea squirts small ghost shrimp and other forms of micro fauna."

 

[jwshiver]

Removing most of my sand seemed to be when biggest improvement happened.

I got tired of fighting it. I gradually siphoned out all of the sand over several weeks while doing water changes. Haven't seen them since. Not to mention my water changes go a lot quicker because I don't have to vacuum the crud out of the sand each water change. Plus I have new real-estate for new chalices, etc.

 

[piehunter]

Anyone tried messing with PH when it comes to Amphidinium?

 

[taricha]

Has anyone had luck with using vibrant on this species?

I was thinking the other day of experimenting with vibrant for this.

@bh750 Hey, remembered you had amphidinium and messed around with vibrant. What'd you observe on that front?

 

[taricha]

Anyone tried messing with PH when it comes to Amphidinium?

you mean high pH?
amphidinium unfortunately enjoy sandbed life, which means they are close to decomposing organics and lower pH zone, where they will likely be protected from most chemical attacks in the bulk of the water column. I strongly suspect elevated pH is the same story.

 

[saltwaterpicaso]

if I pulled out my sand bed a few weeks at a time could I keep the sand im buckets for say 6 months could I reuse it or would they still be active in the sand

 

[bh750]

@bh750 Hey, remembered you had amphidinium and messed around with vibrant. What'd you observe on that front?

Hey Taricha I'll have to go back and check. It's been a long road and lots of battles . It went something like this for me:

- October 2014. started a sterile tank. All rocks acid and bleach bathed. All sand new. Tank scrubbed down with bleach and acid.

- seeded with stuff from IPSF.org. Pods and live sand activator.

- going great. After 6 months added a single piece of rock from my very trusted LFS

- then the Dino's happened. For a long time. No clue what I was doing or what kind I had.

- I have to go back and see what happened. I may have removed all rock and scrubbed.

- then had a bad algae outbreak. I'm pretty sure the Dino's were not visible at this point.

- discovered Vibrant and thought it was the best think ever, at the time. Think it caused so many problems, just a hunch.

- Vibrant immediately took care of my GHA. Soonafter the battle with Cyano began.

- to combat cyano I worked on ultra low nutrient levels. Tons of water changes.

- then came the Dino's. Large celled amph.

- finally got Dino's under control by adding biodiversity.

This is now over 3 years later!

So let me go back and see if I can find the impact vibrant had on my Dino's, if any.

 

[._Z_.]

- finally got Dino's under control by adding biodiversity.

If you can recall, how did you “add biodiversity”? Increase nutrients? Did you add pods?

 

[bh750]

If you can recall, how did you “add biodiversity”? Increase nutrients? Did you add pods?

Hi Z,

So here's what I did:

• 6lbs of Walt Smiths Fiji Mud to various spots in the tank and refugium
• lbs of garf grunge
• 5 lbs of grunge plus

Stuff stuff from indo pacific sea farms and reefcleaners.org:

• snails
• worms
• mini stars
• astrea stars
• CUC s
• snails
• cucumbers
• These were with some different shrimp and a brittle starfish I already had.

Also added "live sand activator" from Indo Pacific Seas Farms.

Basically any kind of live fauna I could think of from a trusted source. I did alot of research and the above is what I came up with.

I already had a healthy population of pods and other worms but I definitely have added if I didnt.

In hindsight I also would've added a dose of phyto to boost the pod population.

It's been 2 and a half months and I don't see any dinos on my sand or rock. I know they're there b/c I was inspecting samples from my Cyano outbreak under my microscope.

Not sure which part was key, but I'm suspecting all of it

HTH!
Bryan

 

[bh750]

@bh750 Hey, remembered you had amphidinium and messed around with vibrant. What'd you observe on that front?

@taricha

Ok I had to go back and look at all of my posts here on this subject. Not a problem as Ive been meaning to chronicle at all as get near the end of beating all of this. So good exercise. But, yes, I did treat my tank with vibrant to battle dinos and GHA. I actually thought the brown dusting on the rocks was algae but turned out to be dinos. It took care of it in a matter of days. Of course left me with cyano, and then worse dinos down the road. As much as I hoped (and believed) it was a miracle product I probably would never use it again. I think it killed off alot of beneficial life in my system is my guess.

I'll post my experience from October 2014 until now very soon.

 

[Rimsky]

I have a persistent issue of Amphidinium on my sandbed (confirmed via microscope) Usually, it is only on the front side of the aquarium, not on the back, were it is mostly shaded. I'm going to try "shifting" the sand from the back to front and see what happens. Will put double socks in my sump while I do the swap and keep them there for a few hours hoping to catch some of the dinos in the process.

But I'm hoping that the swap can help a bit by moving the amphidinium infested sand to the back side where the conditions are not good for them, and see what happens.

 

[Rimsky]

Another thing that I'm also experimenting with is placing some "dead coral tiles" on top of the sandbed on the front side of my tank, where I'm having the amphidinium issue. Hopefully, that way I don't have to remove the sandbed, "fix" the issue and gain extra area for corals. Everything else in the tank is good, so I don't want to start disrupting things with chemicals, blackout periods, etc.

 

[taricha]

Another thing that I'm also experimenting with is placing some "dead coral tiles" on top of the sandbed on the front side of my tank, where I'm having the amphidinium issue. Hopefully, that way I don't have to remove the sandbed, "fix" the issue and gain extra area for corals. Everything else in the tank is good, so I don't want to start disrupting things with chemicals, blackout periods, etc.

What are you meaning the coral pieces to do? Attract? Repel? Change the sand bed somehow?

 

[Rimsky]

What are you meaning the coral pieces to do? Attract? Repel? Change the sand bed somehow?

They are like tiles or flat slices of dead coral that I got from my LFS. The idea is to place them over the sandbed, blocking light, flow, etc., preventing amphidinium dinos to grow. I can then place corals over those tiles. My hope is to control amphidinium by reducing the exposed area.

Like the picture, perhaps larger tiles. I can cut them.

 

[taricha]

The idea is to place them over the sandbed, blocking light, flow, etc., preventing amphidinium dinos to grow. I can then place corals over those tiles. My hope is to control amphidinium by reducing the exposed area.

Interesting. My guess is that amphidinium will move to the unoccupied substrate and colonize it quickly.
I'm curious to see how it'll go. Keep us updated.

 

[CDavmd]

Another Update: Still no sign of Dino's. Granted there are only a few small patches of sand left but in the past I could see them growing on these small patches and now no longer. I will not claim to have beaten them yet but I'm optimistic. Green algae is growing but not out of control and the new Tang really keeps things mowed down. Only a few spots where it is growing on corals and not bad.

Interestingly, I have not changed the feeding habits with the tank. I am not dosing phosphate or Nitrate (they have maintained nicely by simply feeding and removing phosphate media and stopping the NOPOX several months ago) yet on my most recent testing the phosphates have taken a real jump. Nitrates still hover between 20-30 but Phophate that had been consistently between 0.1-0.2 has now jumped to 0.35! I'm seeing my Goni's closing up and I'm a little concerned its getting too high. Considering adding Dr. Tim's waste away again or just putting in some phosguard in my skimmer overflow box. I think I should try to get them down a bit to the 0.1 range.

Also wondering when I might pull the trigger and add a little sand back to the tank. The new build is going slow and it will be a while before I move things over, I really do not like the look of bare bottom.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Also thought I would share this data- My tank ran for several years first with Vodka and then with NOPOX fairly low nutrient levels. I left town for 10 days in late september and asked my wife to dose the NOPOX. She ended up doubling the dose by mistake. When I got home, I had several bleached SPS and my nutrients were zero. Shortly after I began seeing what I thought were Diatoms and later realized they were Dino's. You can see in the graph the bottoming out of nutrients and the moment Dino's first appeared.

Another Update:

So still no signs of Dino's over the past month. Hair algae really started getting out of control despite my Tang munching away. I had that period described above with really high phosphates and my corals really did n0t like that, in particular my Goniapora frags which all basically closed up and looked dead. I continued with feeding the fish and tank but cut back a little. I also did a pretty thorough cleaning blasting the rock of detritus and such. I also used a little Dr. Tims refresh for 2 weeks and this helped knock down the Nitrates and Phosphates to more reasonable levels. I think I have found a sweet spot in terms of feeding and phosphate/Nitrate levels not getting out of control. Currently my Nitrates are in the 4-8 range and FINALLY my phosphates are running 0.06 to 0.15. The algae has receded some but there are still patches on the rock here and there and on some stony corals. Best of all though my corals are starting to look healthy again and the Goni frags are finally starting to peek out again. Things seem to be on the right track.

I decided it was time to start re-introducing sand again. I picked up some Carib sea Tonga mesoflakes and some pods from Florida pets. I added a little bit of sand in the bare areas up front. Just enough to coat at most 1/2 an inch. Dumped in a lot of Pods in the dark with pumps off and let them find there places over night. Tank is looking great this morning and parameters are spot on.

I'm going to continue testing Phosphate daily this week and then start every other if things stay stable. Really would like to get keep them in this range and allow more of the turf algae to recede.

Fingers crossed that the Dino's are back in there proper food web location!!

Here's a picture of the Tank this morning-

Here's my data to date:

 

[taricha]

Another Update:

Excellent post. I especially love the timeline showing the different phases in the bloom / recovery. Well done!