Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods

[Murraydar]

Hey all, I just got rid of these guys for the third time in my tank. I'll share my observations and how I dealt with them.

First time I had them was about five years ago when I started getting into corals. At the time people were treating dinoflagellates with hydrogen peroxide and nutrient removers like gfo, so I tried that as well. In the end, I didn't get rid of them. I found a nicer, larger tank that I upgraded to and started over. First tank had undetectable po4 and around 30 nitrates.

In my new tank I've had it twice. First time it happened I tried nutrient control and hydrogen peroxide. Those did nothing, even with heavy gravel vacs, siphoning, bubble scrubbing, blackouts. At the time I was running carbon, a skimmer, and vodka dosing. My nitrates were elevated in the 40ppm range but my phosphates were always zero. So after many unsuccessful attempts to get rid of it I went with the "dirty method". Against all common coral keeping advice, I stopped vodka dosing, removed the carbon, turned off the skimmer for half the day and took my gfo offline. It took a few weeks, but day by day they went away until the tank was perfect again.

Second time was a few months back. Tank looked great and perimeters were fine, been using an algae scrubber to much success, but my phosphates were "high" at about .1 ppm. Wanting to get more into sps, I added gfo to bring it down. Within about a week or so the dinos were back. Once again, I removed the carbon, took my scrubber offline (it was completely engulfed in dinos at this point), took out the gfo, and let the tank go. All i did was make sure it was aerated and had good circulation. Once again they disappeared over a period of about three weeks.

Here's what I took away from my experiences:

- Gfo was the common denominator. Every time I used it I ended up driving my phosphates too low, which I believe is what is causing the blooms. From what I've read on these forums in the past couple years the vast majority of reefers are getting dino blooms when their phosphates hit zero (or close to). From the older reefers I hear that Dinos were not very prevalent years back, probably because they didn't have the capability to reduce nutrients to as low of levels as we do.

- Amphidinium doesn't seem to be super toxic. I had no large scale die offs in my tanks.

- UV did nothing for these, I used it every time I had them. It's possible it does kill them but there's too many in the sandbeds to kill them all. I was using it in my sump, I couldn't tell you if putting it in the display would help.

- Gravel vacs and siphoning helped, but I don't feel its super important when trying to get rid of them. They would be back in full force then next day when I did it. The last time I had a dino bloom I barely did any siphoning, they just slowly dwindled down to nothing as time went on.

- Blackouts do nothing. They always come back within a couple days.

- I did dose waterglass to raise silicates and try to out compete them with diatoms. While I did notice some nice sponge and diatom growth (especially on the glass) I can't say for certain if it actually helped reduce the dinos. Sorry.

- Raising ph did nothing. I had my tank heavily aerated and dosed with kalk to keep ph up to around 8.6 to 8.7 at times and it didn't both them.

- H2o2 did nothing against this species whatsoever. Obviously other people have had luck with it so it still may be a viable tool.

- Around the time the dinos were being defeated the glass and sump started growing green algae again. I do have some hair algae growing on some rocks but my clean up crew munches it down quickly.

- Ordering pods and dosing phytoplankton, in my experience, did nothing. The pod population did explode to insane levels though (looked like swarms of flies in my fuge), which was pretty fun.

- Adding straight up 'biodiversity' did nothing. I ordered garfs gunk and tried getting nice pieces of live rock full of goodies when I went to local fish stores. The creepy crawlies I got were cool but it didn't do anything for slowing the dinos.

- Bacterial additives did nothing for me, including Vibrant.

- No medications helped, including Dino X.

- Water changes neither reduced nor created more dinos.

As of today my tank is sparkling clean from dinoflagellates. I am no longer trying to keep my nutrients at ultra low levels, all it has caused me is headaches. All I use for filtration is an algae scrubber (which works incredibly well) and my skimmer part time. I'm not using carbon at this time as I see no real reason to. I'll most likely never use GFO again. I know many reefers use is it effectively, it's just not something I want to deal with again. My nitrates are sitting at around 15 ppm and phosphates are just over .1ppm and all my corals are quite happy. Hope this helps someone fight this scourge!

 

[taricha]

Silicon..... 99.96 µg/l ....
With the readings from my RO/DI, I need to be very careful of not overdosing.

this is not really a lot of Si, this is 100ppb = 0.10ppm Si. I dose to ~10x that much daily.

Bolding the things I 90-100% agree with

Hey all, I just got rid of these guys for the third time in my tank. I'll share my observations and how I dealt with them....
Here's what I took away from my experiences:

- Gfo was the common denominator. Every time I used it I ended up driving my phosphates too low, which I believe is what is causing the blooms. From what I've read on these forums in the past couple years the vast majority of reefers are getting dino blooms when their phosphates hit zero (or close to). From the older reefers I hear that Dinos were not very prevalent years back, probably because they didn't have the capability to reduce nutrients to as low of levels as we do.

- Amphidinium doesn't seem to be super toxic. I had no large scale die offs in my tanks.

- UV did nothing for these, I used it every time I had them. It's possible it does kill them but there's too many in the sandbeds to kill them all. I was using it in my sump, I couldn't tell you if putting it in the display would help.

- Gravel vacs and siphoning helped, but I don't feel its super important when trying to get rid of them. They would be back in full force then next day when I did it. The last time I had a dino bloom I barely did any siphoning, they just slowly dwindled down to nothing as time went on.

- Blackouts do nothing. They always come back within a couple days.

- Raising ph did nothing. I had my tank heavily aerated and dosed with kalk to keep ph up to around 8.6 to 8.7 at times and it didn't both them.

- H2o2 did nothing against this species whatsoever. Obviously other people have had luck with it so it still may be a viable tool.

- Around the time the dinos were being defeated the glass and sump started growing green algae again. I do have some hair algae growing on some rocks but my clean up crew munches it down quickly.

- Ordering pods and dosing phytoplankton, in my experience, did nothing. The pod population did explode to insane levels though (looked like swarms of flies in my fuge), which was pretty fun.

- No medications helped, including Dino X.

These I wanted to comment on

- I did dose waterglass to raise silicates and try to out compete them with diatoms. While I did notice some nice sponge and diatom growth (especially on the glass) I can't say for certain if it actually helped reduce the dinos. Sorry.

- Adding straight up 'biodiversity' did nothing. I ordered garfs gunk and tried getting nice pieces of live rock full of goodies when I went to local fish stores. The creepy crawlies I got were cool but it didn't do anything for slowing the dinos.

- Bacterial additives did nothing for me, including Vibrant.

- Water changes neither reduced nor created more dinos.

I'll most likely never use GFO again. I know many reefers use is it effectively, it's just not something I want to deal with again.

the silicates definitely don't hamper dinos directly, I'd say it gives us another possible dimension of competition in addition to green algae.
Most "biodiversity" is unhelpful, some I have actually found to graze dinos in amounts that are noticeable.
bacterial - some have seen progress with bacterial additives, but most have not, and it's really hard to say what bacterial source might be helpful, and what we'd hope it does. It may likely only serve to disrupt the bacteria that the dinos have cultivated in their mats, and weaken their chemical influence on the system. Hard to say.
water changes story was the same for me as what you report, but many others have experienced it differently.
oh, and on pH, thanks for report - few have tried it, but I would suspect due to amphidinium hugging the protection of the sandbed and its decaying organics, that they would resist pH raise like they do most other chemical attacks.
GFO's addition of Fe and removal of Si may also be important, but the PO4 is certainly the easiest connection to see. I've been wondering if some crushed up aragonite in a media reactor would lower PO4 in a way that has less side-effects. just thinking out loud.

 

[CDavmd]

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:

Hi Gang, thought I'd provide another update. So after the above with no Dino's visible for about 2 weeks after adding sand again- I noticed some cyano and possible Dino's only in the new sand areas. They were clearly suppressed and had been for quite a while in the patches I had left for monitoring as noted in my last post. I think the lack of diversity of the new sand (being clean dead sand) allowed them to start moving in first.

I looked under the microscope and saw the cyano species that twirls like a spaghetti and a few amphidinium here and there but nowhere near the population of the past.
The cyano never really got out of control but clearly there was some brewing in well lit places and on coral skeletons ( thank you dinoX).

I really did not want to pull all the sand again- so I siphoned out all the bad areas, then gave the sand a rinse in RO water and Peroxide for a few minutes. Rinsed again with just RO and put the sand back in.

Here is the one thing- I had one area I could not siphon out. I decided to try and just aspirate this sand into a turkey baster that had some peroxide in it and then let it gently fall back out without dosing too much of the peroxide (yeah really dumb idea). Well all was going well but a bunch of the peroxide got dumped into the tank. I would say it was about 50cc into my 4o gallon tank.

So......I saw a lot of coral sliming for a few hours, my anemone closed up over night, and a few LPS did not look happy. The next day the tank looked amazingly clear. All the corals except my scrolls looked fine, the anemone was back with big bubble tips. I knew I had nuked the bacterial populations so decided to dose Dr. Tims, ecobalance for two days, followed by refresh for 1 day and waste away for 1 day. I also started dosing the sponge excel as noted in this thread.

Guess what- all that cyano disappeared and has not returned, going on 1 month now. Some hair algae on my SPS disappeared too and the corals are thriving. Some Goni's that I thought were goners all these months ( again courtesy of Dino X) have started showing polyps on the dead skeleton. Things are coloring up beautifully.

oh yeah....but again I saw just a hint of Dino's......very very little. I started dosing Sponge excel and now I have a very minor diatom bloom but my snails and crabs and pods are quite happy and thriving on it. My Tomini tang is actually feeding on it too.

It's just the slightest brown dusting and seems to be dissipating despite increasing my daily dosing of Sponge excel by 10 drops per day. I'm up yo 70 drops this morning. Testing has shown a nice consistent rise in Si

I looked under the scope this weekend at some sand grains. Lots and lots of diatoms, all sorts of varieties! Still a few Dino's swimming around but nowhere near a big population.

....and the Cyano has not returned!

I'm feeding daily and my phosphates maintain a consistent 0.1 to 0.2 (seems to spike after using reef roids). Nitrates are hovering consistent between 8-12 by the Nyos Kit.


Cheers all

 

[Subsea]

When I use hydrogen peroxide to sterilize in tank, I use a needle which goes into crevices. It zaps aptasia. A tooth brush soaked in hydron peroxide has enough residual peroxide to oxidize on contact. It dissolves Aptasia on contact under water. Dilution of peroxide requires underwater operations to be less than 1 minute.

I run all of my systems on high nutrients. I have found low nutrients to favor cyno & Dino. My solution has always been to feed more to grow more desirables. I like using ornamental macros in my mixed garden lagoon tanks.

This picture is two macro algae growout tank. Each 55G tanks with Dragons Tongue and Red Grapes. I just started introducing 5th generation marine mollies

 

[janos]

Hi to all,here is some pics how Si and taricha help me to clean Dino.

The reddish braun pach is not Dino it is Diatom,but am happy with that,because after that coming the green.Natural occurring.

 

[taricha]

Hi Gang, thought I'd provide another update.
... I noticed some cyano and possible Dino's only in the new sand areas. ... I think the lack of diversity of the new sand (being clean dead sand) allowed them to start moving in first...

Yep. Open real estate gets colonized easily by dinos.

I looked under the microscope and saw the cyano species that twirls like a spaghetti and a few amphidinium here and there but nowhere near the population of the past.

Spirulina!

...coral skeletons ( thank you dinoX).

That product seems frequently hard on corals.

....a bunch of the peroxide got dumped into the tank. I would say it was about 50cc into my 4o gallon tank.

Guess what- all that cyano disappeared and has not returned, going on 1 month now. Some hair algae on my SPS disappeared too and the corals are thriving.

A big overdose of oxidizer would hit cyano especially hard and knock back green algae quite a bit too, but it's usually temporary.

oh yeah....but again I saw just a hint of Dino's......very very little. I started dosing Sponge excel and now I have a very minor diatom bloom but my snails and crabs and pods are quite happy and thriving on it. My Tomini tang is actually feeding on it too.

It's just the slightest brown dusting and seems to be dissipating despite increasing my daily dosing of Sponge excel by 10 drops per day. I'm up yo 70 drops this morning. Testing has shown a nice consistent rise in Si


I looked under the scope this weekend at some sand grains. Lots and lots of diatoms, all sorts of varieties! Still a few Dino's swimming around but nowhere near a big population.

....and the Cyano has not returned!

These points are well in line with what I saw dosing Si.

 

[taricha]

Hi to all,here is some pics how Si and taricha help me to clean Dino.

The reddish braun pach is not Dino it is Diatom,but am happy with that,because after that coming the green.Natural occurring.

Interesting!
Microscope pics?

 

[Jeff Sawyer]

I was on the other thread and promised more details so apologize for the long post.

Equipment: Tank cycled in April of 2017. 100 gal Dt, 35 gal sump, 3 Kessel A-160s, 2 Vortech MP40s, Reef Octopus Classic 110 INT Skimmer, 80 lbs dry pukani rock, 80 lbs live sand. Using RODI filters changed 1 month ago TDS 0.

Parameters:
Salinity: 1.024
Ammonia: 0
N03: 5 Red Sea (This was soon after dosing 15 ml of Seachem Flourish Nitrogen was running near 0 before that)
Phosphate: 0.0 (I don’t get this one. GFO has been off for 6 days, been feeding more yet this number still fell, last reading on Phosphate was .20 before turning GFO off. Since adding the GFO this number has not been stable at all.)
PH: Dark 8.1 with lights 8.4
Alk 2.32 meg/L

Stocking:
1 Clown Fish
1 Royal Gramma
2 Firefish
2 Emerald Crabs
5 Hermit Crabs
Had 1 Peppermint Shrimp (lost him in the die-off too)
I had about 8 Turbo Snails, I think one survived the die-off.
Nassarius, Cerith snails seemed to survive well.
Still seeing a few micro brittle stars (so not sure how many of these died but know I lost some)
Various Softie corals.

Background:

This was my first reef tank, and first tank of any kind for more than 20 years. I did lots of research but somehow missed the fact that maybe I should have rinsed the sand. So I didn’t, the tank cycled normally but always had brown patches.

I was growing Chaeto in refugium, using a skimmer and doing water changes (15-20% every two weeks). Nitrates we’re always near 0. Phosphates were always high.

The tank also seems to be maturing slowly. (I’m 16 months in and just starting to see some CA).

So thinking I had left a large source of silica and a slower maturing tank, I just thought I was dealing with an extended diatom bloom. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

Like I said in previous post I added GFO because I was seeing some GHA and the constantly high phosphates. Shortly after that dead snails and brittle stars and dead peppermint shrimp. That’s when I started suspecting Dinos. Microscope shows large cell Amphidium, I’ve taken multiple samples and checked them under the microscope I can’t find any other type of Dino.

Where I am Now:

I did a 4 day black out. This knocked it back and seems to have stopped the die-off. But within 2 hours of turning the lights back on, small orange patches started forming again. I started dosing Seachem Flourish Phosphorus and Seachem Flourish Nitrogen yesterday. Ordered some pods from algaebarn to increase diversity. Ordered SpongExcel Silica solution. Current plan is to get the Nitrates and Phosphates up and stable then start dosing silica.

 

[JAMSOURY]

So it’s been a couple of months and no dinos. I went with an experimental approach since I was getting desperate and tried almost everything and maybe a little bit of everything helped. I used garf grunge, Fiji mud, amphipods, copepods, UV sterilizer, silica dosing, all while keeping my nutrients up and the dinos still would not go away.

I got pretty frustrated so I tried a super blackout attack just to experiment. I don’t have any sps in this system so I don’t know how a blackout would affect them but all my soft corals and fish survived.

I did a three day blackout then lights on for one day, then another three day blackout. I turned the lights back on for about 5-7 days and did another three day blackout and one day lights on, followed by another three day blackout.

I think what may have happened is that the super blackout killed and slowed the reproduction of the dinos all along while also getting killing some off when i ran the Uv sterilizer. During the first three days it receded a little bit but we all know it comes back fast, so I gave my corals one day of light and then blacked out for another three days. After the first double blackout phase, the dinos were not anywhere to be found but we know they’re probably still in the system. So I hit it with another double black out phase with the one day of rest in between. Again, this is with all mud, grunge, silica, P&N, and UV sterilizer that I used. So I think the blackouts might have given enough time for all the algae/good bacteria/silica to settle in and populate my tank before the Amph dinos could start kicking back in.

This is without removing my sand bed. Also, if you try this, I recommend running a good skimmer to keep ph levels up because I know long blackouts can affect the fish/coral.

Be careful when trying this approach as I do not know how it will affect your corals/fish. I got desperate and tried something new which seemed to work out for me. Hope this may help you guys and your battles!

 

[janos]

Hi to all try to make some pics with my cellphone from microscope,very very hard.





before,and after SI dosing

 

[bdub22rhp]

How long of dosing silicates before anyone started seeing diatoms? I have only been dosing a week and am up to ~.8 ppm silica. Just curious as to when I should start to expect to see them show up. Nutrients are high based on previous attempts of battling.

 

[janos]

Hi i dosed 5 day long home made sodium si but aggressively 5ml a day,and now i have diatom bloom.But i have lot of patient so i could wait till it is gone and the green algae is coming.

 

[MannyT]

It’s been a little over a week since I noticed any brown spots on my sand, then all of a sudden I started noticing the rust spots again, not as bad as before though. For some reason, they’re only showing on the edges of the rocks. Anyone else have this happen or know why this happens?

 

[taricha]

How long of dosing silicates before anyone started seeing diatoms? I have only been dosing a week and am up to ~.8 ppm silica. Just curious as to when I should start to expect to see them show up. Nutrients are high based on previous attempts of battling.

Most never see a "bloom" of diatoms, likely because the dinos and diatoms combine to deplete trace elements.
So after a Dino bloom, there's not much there to support a large bloom. Only small dustings, and microscope observations tell you the diatoms are in place and doing their job.
I run 2.00ppm SiO2, 7ppm NO3, and 0.10ppm PO4 and my sand is white, only microscope shows the diatoms.

It’s been a little over a week since I noticed any brown spots on my sand, then all of a sudden I started noticing the rust spots again, not as bad as before though. For some reason, they’re only showing on the edges of the rocks. Anyone else have this happen or know why this happens?

Someone else posted pics like this, brown right on the shadow line. If you sample that line under the scope, it would be amphidinium I think?
I don't really know, but my best guess is that the shadow line is preferable because the full bright area has been nutrient depleted by photosynthetic stuff growing, so the amphidinium can move out into the light to get that, and move into the shade to get nutrients.
This hypothesis is just from analogy with the way they move up and down relative to sand surface on a daily cycle.

 

[MannyT]

It’s been a little over a week since I noticed any brown spots on my sand, then all of a sudden I started noticing the rust spots again, not as bad as before though. For some reason, they’re only showing on the edges of the rocks. Anyone else have this happen or know why this happens?

So after about 3 weeks with barely any signs of brown spots, the Dino’s have returned and about as bad as I’ve ever seen them. Almost every inch of sand is covered in rusty brown layers. Nitrates and phosphates are still elevated and I continue to dose silica. I haven’t noticed any other algae growing in the past few weeks. After the bloom of Dino’s, I decided to do my first wc in about a month and siphon some of the sand out. I’m continuing to dose silica but I’m not sure I see any diatoms, only reddish brown covering my sand. Just when I thought I was headed in the right direction, these things came back with full force. Sigh.

 

[OpenOcean33]

Can we identify these types of dinos ?? Phosphate .02ppm nitrate 4ppm. Took chemi pure blue off line one week ago which had phosphate at 0. Plan on going the dirty method hopefully any advise ? Black out and h202 dosing has failed.

 

[cchomistek]

@taricha since amphidinium basically live in the sand if I were to remove the sand should this in theory get rid of the dinos or will it just then migrate to the rocks??

 

[bh750]

Hi everyone. Been awhile so I thought I'd post an update of my success. Thanks to everyone here.

Back on April 18 I started a full out biodiversity attack. Within a few weeks my Dino's were no longer visible. I then battled Cyano for the longest time (actually have been for almost a year--- scroll to the bottom to see how I got rid of those). I never did get to trying out silica.

So here's what I did to really increase biodiversity and rid my tank of "visible" Dino's:

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

Literally within a few days I could see an impact. May have only taken a week for them to disappear. Can't remember.

Since then I occasionally dose of phyto as well.

Cyano: this has been just as much of a problem as the Dino's or more. And the result is very strange.

Anyway for probably a year I've been trying to get rid of these guys. Tried EVERYTHING - H2O2, microbubbling, high nutrients, low nutrients, and almost daily siphoning through a 5 micron filter sock. That was painful. Sometimes I'd stop siphoning to see if they'd grow out and die.

The End: a few weeks ago I went on a 1 week vacation. I have everything remotely monitored via apex. Early into the trip I found my tank temp was shooting up to 83.5F!!! I think it was bc we had the house AC on vacation mode. Even tho the tank is on the basement where there's no AC. Anyway I wound up turning off some pumps and all tank and fuge lights remotely. All I could do. It was like that until we arrived home 4 days later. I got the tank temp under control and turned all lights back on. Of course there was no Cyano. Tank looked amazing.

Well, for some reason...the Cyano has never returned!!!! Best stroke of luck I've ever had in 15 years of the hobby! (Not sure why but don't care. I'll share this separately in another thread bc I really do care why)


So about 4 months Dino free and one month Cyano free. Hope this helps! Another success for the biodiversity approach.

Bryan

 

[cchomistek]

@taricha since amphidinium basically live in the sand if I were to remove the sand should this in theory get rid of the dinos or will it just then migrate to the rocks??

Anyone have any thoughts on this method to rid amphidinium? Will they just move to the rock or will this get rid of them?

 

[KMG]

Hi guys!
How about light in the tank during dino battle? Low and blue? Or full power? I went with the low and blue. If I recall correctly, diatom is more fit in low light than dino?
And yes, I am dosing to No3 5-10 ppm, Po4 to 0.1 and glasswater to around 2 ppm. And keep my fingers crossed