Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods

[Neoalchemist]

Since all of the dinos seem to be isolated to the sand surface during the day, do you think rigging up a cheap UV sterilizer like this with some Al foil on the outside as a deflector and running it back and forth over your sand would have a decent effect?

https://www.amazon.com/Sarora-Subme...ht&qid=1556637092&s=pet-supplies&sr=1-28&th=1

I would probably kill dinos, but barring any accidents with fish or other sessile inverts, it will sterilize that sand area and the first organism to move into the new clean real estate will be ... pause for drum roll, ... Dinoflagellates.

 

[Entz]

Yeah re-population is a big issue, no matter how much we suck out or kill there are zillions around to replace. I think a traditional UV would still be a better bet (I don't see any downsides to running one) but i get the idea. They are really keen on merging together into mats. Its an amazing thing to watch when you take a small amount of water and sand and them and put them into a dish. 10 minutes and they are a solid mass. Too bad we couldn't expose that at a greater level. Like making the mat surface and remove them all at once.

In my latest sample I was looking at the mat and noticed something cool, at least to me, about how small these things really are. Here is a picture of them next to a copepod which got squished I think and is being eaten. These are normally impossible to see and the dinos are smaller than its eye.

 

[brandon429]

That is a purely volume based assessment. Stated earlier, you don’t see pico reefs with dinos


Pico reefers remove all masses before they group for the first big pic


Targeted removal, tank full rip cleans with bed washing are the norm of care not the exception

large tankers resist rip cleaning at all costs, they feel it will cause a recycle or more invasion, most are frozen inactive as $ lose

But not the crew in fishbowls lol our Jason Fox specimens grow just fine.

Before there are millions of cells, pico reefers have removed the first snot line as part of new tank care rules

Large tankers practice uglies phasing...purposeful farming of invader

only large tankers hesitate. Find a single pico reef on nano-reef.com with dinos going back to 2004 when that particular subforum started let’s see how many/duration

Nowadays, dinos can be -expected- in large tanks, we are still uninvaded

Based on volume of the tank, and access willingness.

Much can be drawn from a fifteen year running example on invasion control where only volume and willingness to access the system deeply ranges.

 

[Entz]

Yeah I am in the process of removing sand, especially in the heavy infested areas and will Start working towards pulling the rocks.

One thing is for sure I did a crappy job of rinsing my sand

 

[Neoalchemist]

That is a purely volume based assessment. Stated earlier, you don’t see pico reefs with dinos


Pico reefers remove all masses before they group for the first big pic


Targeted removal, tank full rip cleans with bed washing are the norm of care not the exception

large tankers resist rip cleaning at all costs, they feel it will cause a recycle or more invasion, most are frozen inactive as $ lose

But not the crew in fishbowls lol our Jason Fox specimens grow just fine.

Before there are millions of cells, pico reefers have removed the first snot line as part of new tank care rules

Large tankers practice uglies phasing...purposeful farming of invader

only large tankers hesitate. Find a single pico reef on nano-reef.com with dinos going back to 2004 when that particular subforum started let’s see how many/duration

Nowadays, dinos can be -expected- in large tanks, we are still uninvaded

Based on volume of the tank, and access willingness.

Much can be drawn from a fifteen year running example on invasion control where only volume and willingness to access the system deeply ranges.

Here's the rub on "rip cleaning". If you read through this and the main dino thread you will encounter multiple cases where people have had enough. Trash all of their rock and sand and replace equipment and in a few cases replace everything, tank included. Only to have the dinos return after a month or two of restart.
Now I can obviously tell you that if I had to burn that type of time and money only to have them return, I would quit the hobby the next day.
Also like to point out that in a nano if there were a problem with water quality after a "rip clean" a 100 percent water change is a cheap and easy solution. This is not the case in a larger tank. One 100% water change in a 180 would break my reefing budget for a month.
With a 200 gallon tank you can't just take everything out and stick it in a bucket for an hour clean and replace. In a larger tank you need another whole support system with large containers and space to keep everything healthy for the hours you spend cleaning and resetting. I can tell you this much, I won't be cleaning out my pvc plumbing without re-plumbing the system. I hope to God not to rum into an issue with the system while all my livestock is in a kiddie pool in the garage.
Maybe Amazon will drone deliver me a bottle of Prime before everything dies but I doubt it.
I get it "rip cleaning" works... for nano tanks but logistically it's not really an option for the rest of us.

 

[brandon429]

we want them to remove the whole bed all at once and not put it back until the rocks alone + system comply, neat option for large tankers

or at least the ones who are near total takedown/give up based on sustained invasion that type of deep cleaning is different than the norm, and quite powerful.



Since dinos are vectored so much in the trade nowadays, there needs to be requisite planning in large tanks to avoid what is soooo likely. I think some of the changes that must be made are:

-delayed sandbedding.

don't start with one. add a sandbed to an aged balanced uninvaded system, then add your wrasses. do opposite of what gets everyone invaded nowadays. you cannot cause dinos by adding clean sand prepped for later use. sandbeds are 3/4 of the issue associated with dinos anyway...reasons you can't access (mass clouding event) and places the dinos can hide among blankets of organic feed and insulation etc)

-practice fallow and quarantine even for hard scape items not just fish, cost of big tanking.

-have UV already online. we know you may not like it, or have been part of the big back and forth threads on UV pro/con, but its a massive hedge against early dinos as a preventative and to invest in a giant reef without having UV is to put liability coverage only on your new sports car financed on day 1.

-use reef bommies vs rock stacks. Imagine trying to clear a Saxby-type rock wall system of dinos compared to a bommie system where both large rock stacks can be lifted out and sat on the floor complete with corals attached. access is key

inaccessibility is seconday only to gallonage in the reasons large tankers can literally expect to encounter dinos along the way

there are still things large tankers can be doing totally opposite, at the beginning, which closer models how pico reefers maintain a nearly perfect uninvaded approach across all salt mixes, without quarantining hardscape items, across all homes and across all reef skills. they simply have willingness to access and size in their favor/irony

whats not working well for large tankers:
set up a sandbed system, stack rocks and fish as soon as cycle says so, await to see what happens, battle in reverse as masses gain and begin blanketing the system. Its fun to reverse engineer what causes millions of bucks of loss in reef tanks, psychology is big in it, maybe even bigger than the biological part. "I can't access because" rules the roost in todays dino battle threads regardless of size. I even have 15 gallon nano reefers I can't get to impart a cleaning, the slightest touch might cause a recycle etc

having a willing participant is about 90% of the battle regardless of invasion in my opinion. being invaded + hesitant is really all the invader ever needs. I use the term invader to cover cyano, chrysophytes invasions, dinos, diatoms, whatever.

 

[taricha]

@brandon429 Sorry I missed your replies earlier.
I think there's a lot that's great in what you are proposing. Some of your suggestions I strongly disagree with - like that sandbeds have no worthwhile organisms. My sandbed is filled with stuff like these Tanaid shrimp whom I've watched munch patches of sandbed dinos.

If I pull a sample of detritus+sandbed right now, I'd find a ton of copepods and nauplii, some of those tanaids, nematodes, other worms, ciliates, other classes of pods etc.
Where I agree with you is that once a sandbed is covered and dominated in toxic dinos, there is little of value there. It is essentially as you say, "just dirt" (at best). Toxic dinos exclude healthy diversity from their domain.

This thread is still in large part experimentation, and a deep detritus clean ought to be one path that gets experimented with. [Another prong of an approach that I need to write up into the OP is using a controlled onslaught of grunge-eating bacteria - a la the BRS document on Dr. Tims waste-away.]

I am increasingly convinced that there's a connection between sandbed dinos and the sand/debris/bacteria community that is strong and can shape the fate of the dino population.

I don't think the same connection holds for the stringy dino types. They obviously have different nutrient strategies. One is inseparable from the sand and the other seeks out the highest flow and forms strings where nothing else can touch it. For the stringy high-flow types, though a sand-rip might provide some benefits, it seems pretty unnecessary since there are many other ways to target the dinos more directly and controlling the water chemistry is often enough to control them.

I'm going to stop rambling, but sandbed dinos don't just happen to occur on the sandbed. It's their place, their meal ticket, and their way of life. A sand rip would disrupt all of that and detritus removal could be viewed as a proxy war over bacteria communities. We can't quantify bacteria but we can quantify the gunk we rip out of a sandbed. It certainly feels like one way that ought to be explored as we try to get a handle on what these guys are doing down there.

 

[taricha]

They are really keen on merging together into mats. Its an amazing thing to watch when you take a small amount of water and sand and them and put them into a dish. 10 minutes and they are a solid mass. Too bad we couldn't expose that at a greater level....

In my latest sample I was looking at the mat and noticed something cool, at least to me, about how small these things really are. Here is a picture of them next to a copepod which got squished I think and is being eaten. These are normally impossible to see and the dinos are smaller than its eye.

Freaking amazing. That's my new go to for explaining to people why you shouldn't dose phyto and pods into an active toxic dino bloom.
Look at that picture and ask who is eating who?
(the dino cells are small cell amhidinium, almost certainly toxic, the mat behavior you mentioned earlier is based around chemical cues that allow things like this - swarming a much larger invert, flooding it with toxins and mucus. Then when it dies, its decomposition will fuel that dino bloom further.)

 

[brandon429]

gotcha. for sure there are motile creatures no doubt, same as sampling the rock etc agreed they're extra zones for life and some will be specific to the bed

I like to position them as not worth hesitating over though, and replaceable after the cleaning approach to the degree that you can buy certain strains...a huge amount reseed your clean sand off the rock

lastly, in our sand rinse thread we get no motile animals unique to the sandbed that can be seen w the naked eye...we're mainly dealing in microbiology so the collective impacts I never rate too much against a rip clean, or we wouldn't need to evaluate that option at all. We've had the last few entrants into the sand rinse thread, large aquarium bed work, show us pics of the literal rotting mass of dredge detritus (smelling bad now that its destratified) and there's only mud, no neat stuff. no sand turners, like the books said would be there

microbially I bet the samples are thousands of species. we're simply logging the highest rate of cyano cures on any thread w the approach, but, there are few to no verified-by-scope dino entrants, time for more testing~

*that being said I know great science is progressing about supplementing the current-selected strains for boosting against the dinos...animals that already vectored there and are doing well per the scope* that's just the type of evolution to replace the back breaking work of rip cleaning large systems.

 

[Entz]

Freaking amazing. That's my new go to for explaining to people why you shouldn't dose phyto and pods into an active toxic dino bloom.
Look at that picture and ask who is eating who?
(the dino cells are small cell amhidinium, almost certainly toxic, the mat behavior you mentioned earlier is based around chemical cues that allow things like this - swarming a much larger invert, flooding it with toxins and mucus. Then when it dies, its decomposition will fuel that dino bloom further.)

Yeah it was a neat find. It would be interesting to find them actively attacking one that is alive and moving but I think need different slides for that. I am not sure if I killed it or they did lol

 

[taricha]

Yeah it was a neat find. It would be interesting to find them actively attacking one that is alive and moving but I think need different slides for that. I am not sure if I killed it or they did lol

My previous favorite pic for this was one that was alive and thrashing but covered in dinos&mucus and couldn't free itself.

 

[Victoria M]

My previous favorite pic for this was one that was alive and thrashing but covered in dinos&mucus and couldn't free itself.

What!!! I was just going to ask about this ! I have been thinking about that slide all morning! So @taricha did you snap that picture yourself? OMG! I am just abuzz thinking about this. Yesterday I removed the chaeto ball from my DT as it was getting covered in dinos. I splashed it with peroxide and hundreds of copepods came out, most died (I fed them to the QT) I have never harvested that many copepods from the chaeto ball when I was in the fuge. I wonder...were they fleeing the dinos on the sand bed? Or did the fuge pods increase bc I was feeding phyto to the fuge?

 

[Victoria M]

@taricha I am willing to remove my sand if that will improve the efficacy of the the other interventions I am doing. I did notice my pre-filtering of the sand yesterday had less impact on the dinos than just removing the sand.

 

[Victoria M]

Another for you @taricha ...do dinos effect FOWLERS? If one had a FOWLER what could you throw at it to kill dinos? Does copper kill them, for example or flagyl? I am aware most FOWLERS will have tremendous amount of microfauna.

 

[Entz]

Another for you @taricha ...do dinos effect FOWLERS? If one had a FOWLER what could you throw at it to kill dinos? Does copper kill them, for example or flagyl? I am aware most FOWLERS will have tremendous amount of microfauna.

I believe it was mentioned in the other thread that hyposalinity would/should work. If that was the case it would let you clean out things that would otherwise not be easy like plumbing and fish guts (assuming they pass through in a reasonable time).

Murder on inverts/microfauna though.

 

[Victoria M]

I believe it was mentioned in the other thread that hyposalinity would/should work. If that was the case it would let you clean out things that would otherwise not be easy like plumbing and fish guts (assuming they pass through in a reasonable time).

Murder on inverts/microfauna though.

Thanks.

 

[taricha]

So @taricha did you snap that picture yourself? OMG! I am just abuzz thinking about this. Yesterday I removed the chaeto ball from my DT as it was getting covered in dinos. I splashed it with peroxide and hundreds of copepods came out, most died (I fed them to the QT) I have never harvested that many copepods from the chaeto ball when I was in the fuge. I wonder...were they fleeing the dinos on the sand bed? Or did the fuge pods increase bc I was feeding phyto to the fuge?

yes, that pic was from a test tank of mine. Concidentally, I fed the test tank live phyto and pods increased but so did dinos. Dinos eventually won out.
If you want to clear a chaeto ball of dinos, just a quick shake in freshwater is fine. It lyses almost all dino cells. h2o2 not needed.

Another for you @taricha ...do dinos effect FOWLERS? If one had a FOWLER what could you throw at it to kill dinos? Does copper kill them, for example or flagyl? I am aware most FOWLERS will have tremendous amount of microfauna.

metronidazole works partially on some strains. Without coral, you can manipulate the light or use ozone or a general algaecide.

 

[Victoria M]

yes, that pic was from a test tank of mine. Concidentally, I fed the test tank live phyto and pods increased but so did dinos. Dinos eventually won out.
If you want to clear a chaeto ball of dinos, just a quick shake in freshwater is fine. It lyses almost all dino cells. h2o2 not needed.


metronidazole works partially on some strains. Without coral, you can manipulate the light or use ozone or a general algaecide.

That is incredible. Just incredible. Thank you for answering my questions. I appreciate it very much.

 

[Victoria M]

"Toxic dinos exclude healthy diversity from their domain.

This thread is still in large part experimentation, and a deep detritus clean ought to be one path that gets experimented with. [Another prong of an approach that I need to write up into the OP is using a controlled onslaught of grunge-eating bacteria - a la the BRS document on Dr. Tims waste-away.]

I am increasingly convinced that there's a connection between sandbed dinos and the sand/debris/bacteria community that is strong and can shape the fate of the dino population.



I'm going to stop rambling, but sandbed dinos don't just happen to occur on the sandbed. It's their place, their meal ticket, and their way of life. A sand rip would disrupt all of that and detritus removal could be viewed as a proxy war over bacteria communities. We can't quantify bacteria but we can quantify the gunk we rip out of a sandbed. It certainly feels like one way that ought to be explored as we try to get a handle on what these guys are doing down there"
@taricha
I am willing to remove my sand if that will improve the efficacy of the the other interventions I am doing. I only have nasarius snails, no wrasses yet. I did notice my pre-filtering of the sand yesterday had less impact on the dinos than just removing the sand.

 

[David_Cool]

I've never had a problem keeping nitrate between 5 and 10 ppm, but after a week of a new T5 dual bulb light fixture, the algae and other nitrate users have dropped it to 0. Looks like I'll need to increase feeding now too. When you all use the 10 micron filter sock to reuse the water, do you let the water settle first then just pour it through the sock, or do you use it in a sump, or how do you go about using it?