Dictyota and Lobophora spreading

[ksliech]

Over the past few months, I've had several patches of dictyota and what I think is lobophora growing throughout my tank. I've been keeping them at bay with manual removal, but the dictyota in particular has begin to pop up all over the place and will soon be out of control. Here's a pic with both:

I have some emerald crabs who don't touch it, and my flame angel picks at it but doesn't make any dent. The tank is a 60 gallon cube, so a tang is out of the question. I'm running with undetectable phosphate and nitrate, and a cheato refugium that's producing pretty well.

I'm open to an urchin as kind of a last resort, as I am really happy with my corraline growth and don't want all that to get munched away.

Any tips?

 

[Reefering1]

Bump

 

[ksliech]

Bump - it's spreaaaading!

 

[brandon429]

I want this work 100%



There's only one way to do this correctly: reef dentistry. It's not a joke we have 4 year running threads on it with lots of pics.

You don't starve these through the water


We don't bring in wet animals from a pet store, as a guess, to infect your current fish with crypto in 4 months out of nowhere

Literal dentistry is accessing the rock with a streak knife tip

Outside the water

Not in the water

And you scrape that off firmly, debriding surfaces that actually scores a bit of rock and organism holdfasts. This is how growback is managed

It's by you becoming the targeted grazer missing from the equation. All prior reefing teaching has you wait, passively, for a takeover of that live rock which is the most prized in all of reefing

Your impetus to act isn't our scrolls of fixed tanks who broke past access excuses

It's because that's the nicest live rock anyone can attain...and diversity is a two edged sword now. There's no parameter that caused that


Your lighting blue vs white is not implicated here at all, this tank is in balance


Import causes that, and you're lucky to spot it. Before it takes over: you're dealing with winners there, you'd better act.

Lift out the rock and set it on the counter and cut that nub off if you have to it's not hard like concrete. Knife tip the algae areas, digging out little micro divots. In the cleaned dig areas, dribble in peroxide to clean the areas you scraped with steel; then rinse off areas worked and put your tooth back in it's jaw and we evaluate in a month.


We surely might lower light % at that point depending on pics.

At no time is this a chemistry or animal thing. It's a person reef dentist thing if you want to force compliance out of that tank vs just hope for it.

 

[brandon429]

What's in it for me:


After pics #4,322

I collect reef work after pics like baseball cards.

It's OK if you have seven good reasons you can't take action, #1 being the unbreakable arch structure. That preference has felled many a reef tank they'll ride that arch right into a forest no joke.

Getting results in the tank=easy
What home reef organism beats a steak knife?

The hard part is convincing someone to take action, 99% will rather see the tank end vs apply one correct rip clean. It's fascinating, reef psychology. The easy part is forking a plant easily out of a crevice.

Most common excuse #2
It's in a crevice, i can't get to it.

Answer: while on the counter having surpassed reason #1, just push harder with the knife. Wet live rock is weak, get mean.

Excuses #3-10 are much simpler to bypass :)

In the end we'll have some sharp after pics.

 

[ksliech]

What's in it for me:


After pics #4,322

I collect reef work after pics like baseball cards.

It's OK if you have seven good reasons you can't take action, #1 being the unbreakable arch structure. That preference has felled many a reef tank they'll ride that arch right into a forest no joke.

Getting results in the tank=easy
What home reef organism beats a steak knife?

The hard part is convincing someone to take action, 99% will rather see the tank end vs apply one correct rip clean. It's fascinating, reef psychology. The easy part is forking a plant easily out of a crevice.

Most common excuse #2
It's in a crevice, i can't get to it.

Answer: while on the counter having surpassed reason #1, just push harder with the knife. Wet live rock is weak, get mean.

Excuses #3-10 are much simpler to bypass :)

In the end we'll have some sharp after pics.

I've been doing a bit of reef dentistry, but haven't gotten to the point of willing to take everything out and scrape it down. Will absolutely consider it though!

 

[ksliech]

Added this guy over the weekend, with the ability to bring him back once all of this is gone. I saw him eating a patch here for a while, then he took off cruising around. Hopefully he'll really get to work on all of this. Over the weekend I also manually removed the easy to remove big chunks (like in the picture) manually.

The lobophora however, is unbelievably difficult to manually remove, likely necessitating @brandon429's steak knife method.

 

[brandon429]

I think it all looks neat, that's the biodiversity scuba divers see when submerged, all that mix of life

The rip clean, reef dentistry allows targeted removal without chemicals without introducing disease risks and it allows you to keep the other desirable growths

 

[ksliech]

Update: Things have gotten much worse. Tank is getting really overgrown with Dictyota in particular, and now with some translucent green leafy stuff that's much easier to remove. I think my flame angel was keeping the leafy stuff at bay, but I had to remove him after he started nipping at corals.

Water parameters:

• 1.0265 sg
• 8.3-8.4 pH during the day (thank you kalkwasser!)
• Nitrate and phosphate: Undetectable, which is no good
• Alk: 9 dKh
• Ca: 470 ppm
• Mg: 1350 ppm

I took a bunch of pictures before doing a manual removal with tweezers and got a ton of the bulk out, but it's still tightly covering a large percentage of my rock work. Started to encroach on corals here and there and I paid special attention to those areas.

I'm not thrilled about this, but I'm considering using fluconazole, and have bottle of Reef Flux tablets ready to go. I'm going to do a big water change and do some more removal, and I think that's my next step. Any other ideas?

Pics before the big removal job:

 

[ksliech]

I couldn't take it anymore and dosed 7 x 200mg of Reef Flux (fluconazole) on 6/19, following up with 3 x 200mg (the rest of the bottle) a few days later because I was feeling bold. I combined that with significant pruning of the dictyota in the tank. Simultaneously, I started dosing iodide again, and working to get my nitrate and phosphate up from both at zero.

So here I am about 10 days later and:

• Dictoyta is receding dramatically! Every day there is less in the tank and I have no idea where the hell it's going. It's kind of amazing.
• No negative effects seen in any of the other inhabitants, including the chaeto in my 'fuge
• SPS is actually coloring up way more now that I got my nutrients up to 0.05 ppm phosphate and 5 ppm nitrate
• The only thing that's bad is that I have a ton of cyano suddenly in the sand, which I think is related to me getting my nitrates up well before my phosphates

Going to leave it for a few more days before doing a big water change and adding carbon. But so far this has been an amazing transformation for just throwing in a few pills!

 

[ksliech]

18 days after dosing 10 tablets (7 on day 1, the 3 more a few days later) 99.5% of the dictyota is gone!!! Not a single creature in the tank was harmed in the process, which is kind of miraculous.

On day 18 I did a 15 gallon water change and added a carbon reactor which I’ll have running for a week or so.

It just kind of disappeared - it didn’t seem to fall off or get eaten, it just got darker then vanished. A true miracle. There are a few little pieces of it here and there, mostly where it’s not getting direct light. We’ll see if it comes back, but good to know I have this Reef Flux hammer in my back pocket

 

[bluemon]

18 days after dosing 10 tablets (7 on day 1, the 3 more a few days later) 99.5% of the dictyota is gone!!! Not a single creature in the tank was harmed in the process, which is kind of miraculous.

On day 18 I did a 15 gallon water change and added a carbon reactor which I’ll have running for a week or so.

It just kind of disappeared - it didn’t seem to fall off or get eaten, it just got darker then vanished. A true miracle. There are a few little pieces of it here and there, mostly where it’s not getting direct light. We’ll see if it comes back, but good to know I have this Reef Flux hammer in my back pocket

Nice! Glad it worked for you, and thank you for updating here for future lurkers.

Also, what fish in your profile picture?

 

[ksliech]

18 days after dosing 10 tablets (7 on day 1, the 3 more a few days later) 99.5% of the dictyota is gone!!! Not a single creature in the tank was harmed in the process, which is kind of miraculous.

On day 18 I did a 15 gallon water change and added a carbon reactor which I’ll have running for a week or so.

It just kind of disappeared - it didn’t seem to fall off or get eaten, it just got darker then vanished. A true miracle. There are a few little pieces of it here and there, mostly where it’s not getting direct light. We’ll see if it comes back, but good to know I have this Reef Flux hammer in my back pocket

Nice! Glad it worked for you, and thank you for updating here for future lurkers.

Also, what fish in your profile picture?

Thanks! That’s my rhomboid fairy wrasse I had 20 years ago.