Thanks - but not a master really.OMG.I love it. You sir are a true master sensei.
I had never seen a Callogobius hasselti. Are they hard to take care of? Going to go read up on it. Looks amazing!
. But I got through them."Load up on patience."Well. Build threads also have to include the bad parts. So here is a summary for posterity of what I went through in the last few weeks. One of those "down" periods in my tank. Hopefully on the other side now and back to just fun pics:
Turns out, I overdosed GFO (I know, who does that) and I stripped my tank of nutrients. Po4 reading was 0 in my ULR hannah. Shortly after, I started seeing brown patches in my sand.
I thought it was diatoms, but then my snails started dying. So, like a good noob at this I started reading and the evidence pointed to Dinos.
Got myself a microscope and with the help of @taricha I confirmed I had large cell amphidinum. Some pics below at different magnifications:
Before jumping to any drastic measures, I dutifully read the whole thread on Dinos from the @mcarroll here,
and also @taricha's spinoff thread that focuses on Large cell amphidinum here
The main takeaways were:
-The threads are now unwieldy. SO LONG!
-We should stop calling them Dinos and start calling them by their own individual IDs. Since each has a different treatment approach. Doesn’t help much to someone with LC amphidinum to read ostreopsis treatments.
-So, the 1st step is to identify them. Don’t be cheap and try to copy other people's treatments before IDing them. I got a $40 microscope. Cheaper than any of those fancy named 1/4 inch frags. So just do it. (plus its cool!)
-LC amphidinum "hug" the sand. So allegedly UV is mostly useless on them. Yes I know, several people claim UV fixed their LC amphidinum problem. Maybe it did, good for them. I chose to go another route.
-Threads say mostly they (LC) are not toxic, so not to worry. I disagree with this observation. They might not be as toxic as ostreopsis or other Dinos perhaps, since they are not in the water column and one could take more time with a solution and still have healthy corals since the LC stick to the sand, but they were toxic enough to kill all of my snails and all of my conches.
-Seems to me after reading the whole thread that people jump to doing so many crazy things at once, and hoping to solve the problem in just days. Just reading the threads I was amazed at the drastic solutions people jump to. Long blackouts, dosing nitrates + phosphates + hydrogen peroxide + vibrant + dinox + UV + raising temps to 84, etc. Some even replaced their sand bed entirely. Some even dosed Bleach!!!
-I am a relative noob, so what do I know, but doing all of these seemed too drastic and scared me a lot and thought I would only be unbalancing my tank even more.
-So, I decided to take the simple approach @taricha recommended. Which in short, is make sure to have some level of nutrients and dose silicates so diatoms and other organisms can out compete the LC amphidinum.
-Basically I decided my approach would be to change absolutely nothing in terms of my maintenance regime, other than shutting off the GFO and start dosing sponge excel daily. Got myself the hannah Silicate tester and tried to keep my silicates around 2.
-In the beginning, it got worse instead of better. The brown patches grew more. But decided I would stay the course and see what happened. Lots of them! see below.
The above continued for around 3 weeks. where all i would see would be similar to above.
-But after 3 to 4 weeks, I noticed the brown patches were pretty large still, BUT they had a different color to them. More brownish than rust. And after checking in the microscope, I noticed they were now more diatoms than LC anphidinum. Exciting!
-I then got myself a lot of new snails. Continued dosing spongeexcel but at a lower dose and after 6 weeks I would say I have probably won this battle. (the war I don’t know, will have to wait and see)
But my tank is back to normal, at least visually.
Conclusions:
-First ID, ID, ID. If you see someone claiming a treatment worked and they don’t have miscroscope pictures of what they had with their thread, just skip it. who knows what they battled.
-If you have LC amphidinum I would definitely consider dosing silicates. It is low risk, nothing is going to die because you dosed silicates. Worst case scenario the diatom bloom looks ugly, that’s it. And if it doesn’t work, then you can still proceed and do all of that other crazy high risk stuff like dosing bleach if you want to. Personally, I would never have the nerves to do something like that.
-YOU WONT SEE RESULTS OR ANY IMPROVEMENT IN A COUPLE DAYS. NOT EVEN WEEKS. So load up on patience.
-Dosing silicates has been visibly better for my sponges. I had a few on the underside of the rocks that have now grown like crazy. Looks like one even grew inside my pellet reactor. See pic below.
-I might continue dosing silicates to my tank going forward. Just a lower dose. Randy apparently does the same per an old article of his. I have seen no detriment in doing so and my tank actually looks better actually.
-And most importantly, I will never let my nutrients hit ZERO again.
-Do other methods work? Who knows, sure they do like everything in this hobby. But I didn’t try them so no clue.
Thanks to @taricha and @ScottB for the individual help along the way
Some charts of my testing for the last few weeks below:
Thanks @RaegeNice write up. Love the #honestyinreefing sharing the good bad and ugly can help others to avoid of desl with the problems you have lived thru. Thanks
Thanks @Raege
Thanks @Lasse
Thanks!Agree those are some awesome pics.
Goniopora. Nothing more beautiful and few more difficult for me. Set your calendar for 6 months. I have had 4 of them and they double in size and then die in 48 hours. Nothing else blinks. My LFS calls them "short term rentals" and I finally understand why.
I have had acropora colonies the size of a serving plate before chopping no trouble, but once my goni make it to softball size they go poof. I hope you teach me something. (Besides photography!)
There is guy on R2R that posted a video on feeding his amazing acan garden. He mixed a thick paste of Reefroids, sucked it up into a syringe and dumped it into their mouths with the pumps shut. Did some time lapse of them swallowing and then reopening.
