An interesting observation on dinoflagellates

[Skynyrd Fish]

My tank has been up for 20 years. Some live rock has been wet for 28 years. I got Dino’s when I tried sps for the first time six years ago. I’ve had them twice. Last time was about three years ago. I don’t know if they came in on the frags or corals. I notice that when I don’t have any green algae growing on the glass, it’s Dino time. My cure for this was stop water changes, turn off skimmer, and do nothing. I have since put in a fuge and use a smaller skimmer. I have some small patches of gha on my glass that I keep there as a monitor for nutrients. Feed more or less depending on the health of the gha. My tank is sps packed. Dino’s are no joke and it’s disheartening to see them destroy your corals.

So fast forward I had a copper issue with my ro unit. I was getting ati water test and my ro water had copper. My tank tested high copper so I broke out the Hanna and sure enough it tested .17. My corals were not looking good, but not dead. I also had red bug at this time, but did not know it for a few months so I’m not sure if this low level of copper made the corals look bad or not. Copper is an algae killer and I wonder if it could kill Dino’s at a low concentration. I do not know the lethal concentration for corals, but .17 did not kill any. I have sps, maxima clam, a couple candy canes and a hammer. This is something I have thought about for a while.

 

[Snoopdog]

Just a dumb question from reading this thread, Is a dino bloom natures way of adding nitrates to the system?

I thought dinoflagellates actually consume nitrates.

 

[Marc2952]

Yeah I do not think they can win the battle by themselves, they need help. Finally saw four copepods yesterday, not seen a dang one since I setup my tank. I was like finally!! The dinoflagellates are gone, so now they finally have a chance to thrive.

Be careful to not do angthing drastic to the tank for a couple of months i actually have a microscope and even when you cant see the dinos they do appear in the water column motionless.

 

[tvan]

I thought dinoflagellates actually consume nitrates.

I don't know what they eat. But when they die wouldn't they become part of the nitrate cycle raising nitrates or phosphates ?

 

[Snoopdog]

I don't know what they eat. But when they die wouldn't they become part of the nitrate cycle raising nitrates or phosphates ?

If they do it is miniscule, according to Taricha

 

[tvan]

@Snoopdog Thank-you

 

[Snoopdog]

Be careful to not do angthing drastic to the tank for a couple of months i actually have a microscope and even when you cant see the dinos they do appear in the water column motionless.

I am going to leave a single UV light in there for a month. If they do come back though, I can have those UV lights back in the tank in minutes. Before I pull each one though, I am going to do some samples and look for dinoflagellates.

 

[fishface NJ]

Could the use of LED play a role in Dinos? Tank/rocks are live since 2004. Tank had T5, then bought LED and got dino. Had dinos for 6 months. Rinsed rocks in clean RODI saltwater. Cleaned tank and wet items with bleach bath. Placed old rocks back in cleaned tank and used my T5 lights again. No dinos ....knock on wood. The rinse was 12 months ago

 

[Snoopdog]

Could the use of LED play a role in Dinos? Tank/rocks are live since 2004. Tank had T5, then bought LED and got dino. Had dinos for 6 months. Rinsed rocks in clean RODI saltwater. Cleaned tank and wet items with bleach bath. Placed old rocks back in cleaned tank and used my T5 lights again. No dinos ....knock on wood. The rinse was 12 months ago

You would think, but with as many people that do not have dinoflagellates that do have LED, it seems not

 

[Drewbacca]

If everything I read is correct, and so far I am seeing references that it is true then this makes sense why certain things are working for some but not others. If you can knock the dinoflagellates down enough and get a pod population built before the dinoflagellates increase their population you win. If you introduce pods to a tank with thriving dinoflagellates, you basically just fed them and increased their numbers. They are opportunistic feeders, they will eat flesh or light, whatever is more abundant.

People have reported putting pods in their tank as part of their arsenal and them just disappearing, that makes total sense now. I think the trick to pull this off is multipart. You need to drastically reduce the population of dinoflagellates by doing a hefty dose of UV in the beginning, you can probably lessen the amount once you get into maintenance mode. Keep the UV going until you see your tank crawling with copepods, at that point you can coast and turn the UV off. This will be my approach and I will report back.

I know everyone keeps point to zero nitrates and zero phosphates as being the issue but is it possible that those observations are a red herring? Could it not be that the tank is immature and most immature tanks do run very low numbers? We may be missing the big picture here that dinoflagellates are always there and since there is a lack of biodiversity there is nothing to eat them. Basically they spawn out of control because they have no known predator, at least enough to compete with an explosion of them. In nature when the balance gets upset often there is a drastic change. I remember when they added a pond in my subdivision, months later there was an explosion of frogs the first summer. There were so many spawning frogs that you could not walk down the sidewalk without killing a few with each step, it was quite a sight. A little later a snake or two found that pond and then we had a snake issue, you could rarely find a frog. Eventually nature balanced it all out. It seems our problem here is balance is broken. We have removed the predator to dinoflagellates, to some extent anyway.

I am either right or wrong on this, but this is the route I will take.

This comment was ahead of it's time.