Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods

[wedward3]

Will do. Do you think I should keep dosing NeoPhos to get my P detectable and into desired range?

 

[taricha]

IMO, yes. Dinos or not, un-/barely- detectable phos on hanna ULR meter is too low but opinions differ.

 

[Candace Summers]

Thanks for posting what you are doing. Is there someplace I can read in detail about this method? Are there documented successes using this protocol?

I am seeing a change in the dinos. This morning it appears that there is green algae mixing in with them as the brown patches appear green.These same patches were brown last night .I did not siphon the sand last night, but I will tonight. The lights have not come on yet but I took a couple of photos to try and show the color change. I wonder if they will stay green all day? I doubt it, but I have to leave for work soon so I'll have to wait till later to see. The front glass has green algae also so maybe I am making some progress.

 

[taricha]

here's a thread I started on trying to understand this method.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/analyzing-a-bacterial-method-for-dinoflagellates-and-cyano.635165/
(realize it's not really a help/advice thread. It's focused on trying to understand the mechanics of the bacterial actors and their roles.)
promising, but work in progress.

 

[mikedb]

Given the immense amount of help I have received from this thread, I wanted to post my anecdotal experience managing what I have self-diagnosed as an Amphidinium issue in my 140G aquarium.

I have *not* microscopically identified my dinoflagellate issue as Amphidinium. However, I have assumed they were the cause based on the following symptoms: (a) a brown carpet of matter adhering to the sand and glass, reappearing within 24-48 hours when stirred (sand) or removed (glass) (b) an already running 40W Pentair UV system at 140 GPH (c) little apparent effect on my corals- other than my plate coral being being fully retracted since the infestation began, all other SPS, LPS, and soft corals have been happy and healthy, with good SPS growth throughout the infestation.

The cause of the outbreak was low nitrates and phosphates, which were running near-zero when the dinos arose. The root cause of that was a relatively new tank, a new baby causing testing not to happen as often as it should have, and some outdated research from back when ULNS systems were in vogue.

My treatment regimen followed the first post of this thread. I:

• Began dosing phosphates and nitrates to maintain 0.03-0.1ppm PO4 and 5-10 ppm NO3. I purchased a ReefBot to help with the testing workload, to ensure my levels stayed within this range. It is fantastic. I also added the NeoPhos to a spare reservoir in my dosing system, so those levels stay constant, 24/7.
• Began dosing silicates, maintaining concentration with a Hanna cheker
• Purchased some pods and phytoplankton from Algae Barn (no way to know if this made a difference- honestly I have always just wanted to order from them!)

I believe I am starting to see some success. For the first few days I was dosing silicates, they appeared to accumulate in the system, with my Hanna checker reading 0.8ppm after several days of 0.2 ppm daily doses of SpongExcel. Then, suddenly, silicates dropped to zero, and over the past few days I have noticed the brown patches on the sand becoming lighter in some areas, where I believe diatoms may be beginning to grow. I keep dosing 0.2ppm - 0.4ppm of silicates daily, but my Hanna checker reads minimal levels a few hours later.

In the past few days, my livestock is suddenly much more interested in eating the brown stuff off the sand, and I see my foxface picking at it almost constantly. I am also starting to see come fuzz/hair algae returning to the rocks, which is being kept trimmed by the foxface as well.

The battle isn't won, but signs are encouraging. I will post an update in a few weeks.

Thanks to the author of this thread, taricha, and everyone else who has posted! This strategy works!

 

[Victoria M]

Given the immense amount of help I have received from this thread, I wanted to post my anecdotal experience managing what I have self-diagnosed as an Amphidinium issue in my 140G aquarium.

I have *not* microscopically identified my dinoflagellate issue as Amphidinium. However, I have assumed they were the cause based on the following symptoms: (a) a brown carpet of matter adhering to the sand and glass, reappearing within 24-48 hours when stirred (sand) or removed (glass) (b) an already running 40W Pentair UV system at 140 GPH (c) little apparent effect on my corals- other than my plate coral being being fully retracted since the infestation began, all other SPS, LPS, and soft corals have been happy and healthy, with good SPS growth throughout the infestation.

The cause of the outbreak was low nitrates and phosphates, which were running near-zero when the dinos arose. The root cause of that was a relatively new tank, a new baby causing testing not to happen as often as it should have, and some outdated research from back when ULNS systems were in vogue.

My treatment regimen followed the first post of this thread. I:

• Began dosing phosphates and nitrates to maintain 0.03-0.1ppm PO4 and 5-10 ppm NO3. I purchased a ReefBot to help with the testing workload, to ensure my levels stayed within this range. It is fantastic. I also added the NeoPhos to a spare reservoir in my dosing system, so those levels stay constant, 24/7.
• Began dosing silicates, maintaining concentration with a Hanna cheker
• Purchased some pods and phytoplankton from Algae Barn (no way to know if this made a difference- honestly I have always just wanted to order from them!)

I believe I am starting to see some success. For the first few days I was dosing silicates, they appeared to accumulate in the system, with my Hanna checker reading 0.8ppm after several days of 0.2 ppm daily doses of SpongExcel. Then, suddenly, silicates dropped to zero, and over the past few days I have noticed the brown patches on the sand becoming lighter in some areas, where I believe diatoms may be beginning to grow. I keep dosing 0.2ppm - 0.4ppm of silicates daily, but my Hanna checker reads minimal levels a few hours later.

In the past few days, my livestock is suddenly much more interested in eating the brown stuff off the sand, and I see my foxface picking at it almost constantly. I am also starting to see come fuzz/hair algae returning to the rocks, which is being kept trimmed by the foxface as well.

The battle isn't won, but signs are encouraging. I will post an update in a few weeks.

Thanks to the author of this thread, taricha, and everyone else who has posted! This strategy works!

Fingers crossed for you fellow amphidinium warrior. lol. I really admire when hobbyist self reflect on where things went wrong ... to figure it out. Good luck to you!

 

[Ento-Reefer]

This thread has been a huge help to me during this battle.

I had a re-bloom of Amphidinium when I added a very shallow layer of substrate back into my tank . I had thought it would be safe to add it back as I had not seen any dinos in several weeks. I have gotten my tank to the point where cyano has now replaced the dinos, but this is the part that never seems to go away. I don't want to use any chemicals to help with the cyano because that will just bring the dinos back.

I restarted water changes last week after going 6 weeks without any. My plan is to change 25 gallons weekly for the next month or so siphoning out the cyano at the same time and then see how the tank looks. I am going to cut back a little on the amount of food I feed the fish. The are all fat and it certainly won't hurt them to eat a little less. My nitrates are hovering between 15-20 and phosphates are at .15-.2, I am also going to change the flow pattern in the tank to try and get more flow directly over the sand bed. I really wish my tank would find a balance and stop going back and forth between cyano and dinos.

 

[Victoria M]

My amphidinium dinos had reduced to a few patches on what little sand I had left. I recently dosed sludge reducer and blew out my rocks. I noticed some detritus had settled in its usual spot and I planned on getting it today with a small water change. Tha area is completely covered in amphidinium this morning. Just wow!

 

[taricha]

Tha area is completely covered in amphidinium this morning. Just wow!

they know where the goodies are!

 

[Victoria M]

they know where the goodies are!

stoopid amphidinium!

 

[mikedb]

Hi all,

Just an update... I'm having difficulty believing it, but I think I am over the worst of it. I stirred the sand on Saturday and stopped dosing silicates, and ~60 hours later, the only thing on the sand is (what appears to be) some light diatoms. A weee

September 19 (48 hours after turning over the sand):

Today (60 hours after last sand rotation):

As you can imagine, I am over the moon to be on the tail end of this. I know this isn't necessarily over, but clearly things have improved significantly. If things hold out for a few more days, I will continue ordering corals. Even now, areas that started to recede when things got bad are quickly growing back.

Unfortunately, my effort was quite unscientific and I did many things at once, especially when the coral started to show some slight signs of stress. Here are the changes that I made, and I have ordered them based on my opinion of how successful they were:

• Increasing NO3 to ~10ppm and PO4 to 0.05-0.1ppm
• Dosing silicates
• Keeping my NO3 and PO4 in the desired range 24/7 using my ReefBot to automatically test and a spare reservoir/dosing pump to add NO3/PO4 consistently
• My new Clarisea roller mat, which kept mechanical filtration working 100% (I never did any mechanical siphoning otherwise)
• Copepods and Phytoplankton from Algae Barn

Best of luck to you all in your own efforts!

 

[MickeyCT]

Update on my fight against the A-dinos.................

I'm leaving Sunday for a 3 week trip so I didn't want to start anything too drastic that would be a problem if I stopped abruptly and I didn't want to rely on a tank sitter. So I decided to try a couple of simple things in combination. First I attempted to bring my pH up to 8.4 and maintain it there. (see Randy's article on Dinos and pH - http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-11/rhf/index.php). Keeping pH at 8.4-8.5 has proved to be a challenge and I had to add a kalk slurry (made with 1-2 tsps kalk powder to cup of water) one or two times a day but still the pH drifted down under 8.4 by the morning. Second thing - I started dosing silica and am up to 30 mls a day which I'll stop after tomorrow.

Tank looks better than it has in months! Sand mostly clean. Looking under the scope I am seeing some diatoms when I hadn't seen any before but I haven't seen them taking over the tank. I'm crossing my fingers that I don't have a mess when I get back at end of month.

Mickey

 

[nick9one1]

Can anyone tell me how much silicate I should be dosing?

I have a 160l tank.

Thanks!

 

[taricha]

Can anyone tell me how much silicate I should be dosing?

I have a 160l tank.

Thanks!

I had a bottle of Si once that I didn't know the concentration of.
Had to simply do a couple of steps of dilution and test with Hanna meter.

 

[saltwaterpicaso]

how did you dilute your Si I bough a bottle that is 100 percent Si and how do I know how much to dose per tank size

 

[taricha]

how did you dilute your Si I bough a bottle that is 100 percent Si and how do I know how much to dose per tank size

First off, I recommend using brightwell spongexcel because it has detailed dosing guide, until you know how your system uses Silica. Then you can freestyle with more potent solutions.

To answer your Q...
I don't know what percent your super-concentrated Si source is. Nor what 100% Si could mean because I don't think pure silica would be a bottled liquid. Anyway.
Do a 2.0 part per million dilution of whatever is in the bottle.
1.00mL of the bottle into 1000mL distilled water and stir (1 part per thousand)
get new syringe and do 2.00mL of the 1 part per thousand and add it to 1000mL distilled water (2 ppm of whatever is in the bottle).
Then test it with the hanna Low Range Silica meter It'll read up to 2.00ppm SiO2. If the bottle was somehow pure SiO2, you'd read at the max of the meter, 2.00. If it's 50% SiO2 you'll read 1.00ppm if it's 10%, you'd read 0.20ppm etc.

 

[brandon429]

This is a flipping great work thread. Look at those after pics above wow job

Big tank work is rare air nice going all

 

[Idoc]

@taricha. This is really interesting... but also concerning about killing small cell amphidinium dinos. Hopefully you have an explanation...

My coral QT was heavily infested with amphidinium dinos. I just wanted to see what would kill them so started blowing them into the water column and then dosed 1ml H2O2/10g -- minimal impact.

Dosing 2.5mL/10g actually did start to thin them out quite a bit, but they still shed too the glass and lived.

Lost interest and just wanted a quick kill to clean my tank and hob filter... dumped in some bleach and all disappeared, single rock went white, water clear.... scraped off the glass and bottom of tank to spread the dinos into the bleach water. A few days later, repeated with more bleach. The tank was spotless.

A week later, and the rock is turning brown... confirmed with a microscope that the amphidinium dinos were back! If bleach isn't killing these things... what hope do we have in our tanks?

 

[taricha]

Lost interest and just wanted a quick kill to clean my tank and hob filter... dumped in some bleach and all disappeared, single rock went white, water clear.... scraped off the glass and bottom of tank to spread the dinos into the bleach water. A few days later, repeated with more bleach. The tank was spotless.

A week later, and the rock is turning brown... confirmed with a microscope that the amphidinium dinos were back! If bleach isn't killing these things... what hope do we have in our tanks?

Could you estimate the amount of bleach, and water volume? And what kind of bleach? Some off-brands are only 1%.

Although it's possible that you did kill them all and re-contaminated from something else, like a scraper etc, let's assume that didn't happen just for the sake of the discussion.

The amphidinium more so than other kinds of dinos hug the sand and the spaces between sand grains. They tend to very closely stick to organics and debris. This material in a tank has the capacity to disable a surprisingly large amount of bleach (or other oxidizer).

So in crevices of rock, buried in layers of mucus and bacteria filled gunk, some cells were protected from the chlorine oxidation.

In a more big picture sense, such clever evasions are why I don't recommend "nuking" a tank and starting over.
It's ironic that the dino itself is minimally disruptive, but the strongest biocidal agents we can use, kill everything but the dino

 

[saltwaterpicaso]

I have been manually stirring my sand bed once before lights out and again as soon as I get up in the morning to get it suspended and passed threw the uv its helping a lot my sand sifting gobbie is back to sifting the sand he stopped for over a month. My skimmate is a lot darker I'm skimming wet. I forgot to stir the sand bed this morning and the sand was noticeably cleaner so hopefully it will eventually kill all of it off