Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?
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Ok, I need some help. I've been battling what I now know to be dinos for about 6 weeks. Over the last two weeks they have gotten much worse. I've lost several colonies of LPS, All of my zoas are mad and some have receded considerably. Now my monti's are being affected. A huge colony of Poker Star monti is dead, other encrusting monti's, my setosa andmy digi's are also looking bad. I didn't know dinos could be so destructive of coral
My tank is 13 months old (restart after a move). My NO3 has been undetectable ever since my restart and PO4 has been varying from 0.02-0.05 by running GFO when needed.
A week ago I started dosing nitrate with sodium nitrate solution. I have raised my nitrate to 0.5 -0.75 and not surprisingly this is what happened to my PO4.
I took a sample to my office to use our microscope and it certainly is dinos
What species is this? And how do I procede? Should I slow down on nitrate dosing until my PO4 comes back up? Is there anything else I can do? Manual removal is an exercise in futility as it's back on the area I started in by the time I finish at the other end of the tank.
Here's a video of the dinos.
My tank is 13 months old (restart after a move). My NO3 has been undetectable ever since my restart and PO4 has been varying from 0.02-0.05 by running GFO when needed.
A week ago I started dosing nitrate with sodium nitrate solution. I have raised my nitrate to 0.5 -0.75 and not surprisingly this is what happened to my PO4.
I took a sample to my office to use our microscope and it certainly is dinos
What species is this? And how do I procede? Should I slow down on nitrate dosing until my PO4 comes back up? Is there anything else I can do? Manual removal is an exercise in futility as it's back on the area I started in by the time I finish at the other end of the tank.
Here's a video of the dinos.
Jolanta
Active Member
It looks like ostreopsisOk, I need some help. I've been battling what I now know to be dinos for about 6 weeks. Over the last two weeks they have gotten much worse. I've lost several colonies of LPS, All of my zoas are mad and some have receded considerably. Now my monti's are being affected. A huge colony of Poker Star monti is dead, other encrusting monti's, my setosa andmy digi's are also looking bad. I didn't know dinos could be so destructive of coral
My tank is 13 months old (restart after a move). My NO3 has been undetectable ever since my restart and PO4 has been varying from 0.02-0.05 by running GFO when needed.
A week ago I started dosing nitrate with sodium nitrate solution. I have raised my nitrate to 0.5 -0.75 and not surprisingly this is what happened to my PO4.
I took a sample to my office to use our microscope and it certainly is dinos
What species is this? And how do I procede? Should I slow down on nitrate dosing until my PO4 comes back up? Is there anything else I can do? Manual removal is an exercise in futility as it's back on the area I started in by the time I finish at the other end of the tank.
Here's a video of the dinos.
I'm about 10 pages in to this thread and it appears that raising nitrate and phosphorous doesn't help with ostreopsis and can actually make it worse? So what can I do?
OP
OP
mcarroll
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Yes, stop until you can dose PO4 as well.
Things are likely to look worse before they look better, so time to grow a new layer of patience for all this.
If all goes well, you'll have a nice crop of green algae and cyano at the end. Maybe not ideal, depending on your expectations, but healthy and a good home for corals and fish again! (And those algae are easy to deal with using basic husbandry techniques.)
Use activated carbon – 1/4 dose, but changed weekly instead of monthly is what I've been recommending. That will remove any toxins from the water and hopefully bring relief to the animals in your tank while you get a handle on the situation.
If you haven't gone through the resources and links on the first post, do that before wading through all 2000+ posts. In particular the links about Ostreopsis will obviously be interesting now that you know that's what they are.
ImpossibleKid
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Don't get the wrong idea, raising those nutrients does help vs. Ostreopsis. This is the only dino I've had to battle thus far, but keeping nitrates at 5-10ppm and phosphates around .10 ppm definitely helped me overcome Ostreopsis. These methods are to promote long-term success, but for the short term an adequately sized UV sterilizer will do wonders, with activated carbon serving to remove potential toxins.
As @mcarroll said, things will get uglier before they get better. You'll probably see cyano in healthy populations in tandem with dinos, then after that runs its course you'll see some other type of nutrient export. In my case, it was/is bryopsis. As someone who has battled dinos for literal years, I can tell you that I will take any other nuisance algae over dinos any day.
If you do get a UV going or see some algal competition growing, manual removal is definitely worth it.
Yes, stop until you can dose PO4 as well.
Things are likely to look worse before they look better, so time to grow a new layer of patience for all this.
If all goes well, you'll have a nice crop of green algae and cyano at the end. Maybe not ideal, depending on your expectations, but healthy and a good home for corals and fish again! (And those algae are easy to deal with using basic husbandry techniques.)
Use activated carbon – 1/4 dose, but changed weekly instead of monthly is what I've been recommending. That will remove any toxins from the water and hopefully bring relief to the animals in your tank while you get a handle on the situation.
If you haven't gone through the resources and links on the first post, do that before wading through all 2000+ posts. In particular the links about Ostreopsis will obviously be interesting now that you know that's what they are.
I've been through the 1st page links and didn't see anything specific for ostreopsis other than ID?
So I should proceed with raising nitrate and phosphate? Should I cut back on the heavy feeding I've been doing and depend soley on inorganic nutrient dosing? I suspended water changes 3 weeks ago should I start back with weekly water changes? Anything else I can do besides add UV?
One interesting note. Despite my very low phosphate and undetectable nitrate, chaeto grows like crazy in my refugium and there is a substantial amount of hair algae growing on the standpipes and the inside of the overflow. However, there is not one speck of algae in the DT proper and my only herbivore is a moderate sized purple tang. Is this not odd?
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Javamahn
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Beardo any recommendation on easy sand bed removal. I don't want to hassle of a full breakdown so was thinking of using Tupperware or ziplocks to remove sand in stages and minimize release of a 1 year old sandbed that has never been siphoned clean. Tank is a mixed 90G but most of my acros are still frags that have browned so I am not super stressed. I have a large sand sifting starfish that has been super active and helped turned the bed for a year. I will likely have to find a new home for "Patrick". It has been over a month with no water changes my parameters are all in proper range with NO3 around 5-7ppm, PO4 around 0.1, Ca is 420, Alk is 8.1, Mg is a bit low at 1260.Think I will just go BB until I have the amphidinium gone, controlled …..
Randy Holmes-Farley
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It's likely a fine product if you want to add both, but my recommendation is food grade products such as sodium/potassium nitrate and phosphate so you know what you are actually dosing.
Beardo
Well-Known Member
The easiest way, at least for me, is to siphon it out with a water change. I would do it in sections, maybe 1/3 at a time. I know there is a general concensus to not perform water changes during dino bloom but I never noticed a difference either way.
Bret Brinkmann
Well-Known Member
It is my understanding that the toxins are released into the water also. Therefore GAC should help. My snails started dying and getting lazy(er than normal
). Once I added the GAC they bounced back within a day or two. They have sense slowed down again so I will need to change it out. I will give an update in the next couple of days to see if they become more active again. Also my GSP seems to be much happier with the GAC. Full PE all the time now day and night. It was only coming out at night for the longest time. PE got even better once I dosed NO3 and PO4 but the green is a little less brilliant.I think he is trying encourage good testing habits for all parameters not just nutrients. It is also good to know what the big 3 are doing in terms of establishing a healthy reef system. My main question is this, is his name Matthew or Mike?
I swear I've seen it both ways...You have hit the minimum level for PO4 and are within the recommended range for NO3. Just maintain those levels and wait it out. Things should get better I the long run (months) but may look worse for the first week or two.
Raise the nutrients (PO4 and NO3) to the recommended levels and maintain them from here on out. Stop heavily feeding and revert to normal feeding. Food adds C in addition to the other two nutrients which will slow down the beneficial effects of dosing inorganic nutrients.
Do NOT resume WC. Replacing the water you worked to get the proper nutrient amounts into with water that doesn't have those levels is counterproductive. Even if you match those levels by dosing your WC water you are really just creating unnecessary work for yourself.
Get a UV that will give you at least 1/2 Watts per gallon. But the closer you get to 2 Watts per gallon the better it will work from what I've read. Better to go oversized than risk going undersized and it not working. Don't be afraid to get a cheaper unit that is bigger. Run it through the DT to improve effectiveness. Reduce your light on time to help keep them in the water column longer which will improve the effectiveness of the UV. Also blowing off the rocks will help keep them in the water longer for the UV to reduce their numbers even faster.
I guess your tang loves algae that much.
My amphidiniun dinos are in my sand too. I have 4" deep. I plan on keeping my sand in the tank while correcting nutrients. They only go about 1-2" deep. Mostly just under the surface. If nutrient correction keeps them at bay then why take out the sand? It may take a little longer to get rid of them from what I've read but once you knock them back to a certain point they stay off your corals and rocks. Which is really what we care about right? Just curious, not trying to convince you to go either way. Maybe your answer will make me want to remove my sand.
Salty in my opinion there are other ways besides UV but they aren't worth the hesitation risk in a system as large as yours. Collectively UV is shown across dino threads including the really big one at reefcentral/chem forum made by DNA as a recurring theme in fixing up some tanks. The best we can do is keep hand removing the target mats as other options are employed as preventative. There's no form of dino battling that is benefitted from leaving the mats in place to be visually seen, and being dedicated in hand siphon removing them doesn't exclude any sort of nutrient modulation or pod introduction or anything someone wants to do in efforts.
For the rarer times someone is dumping gallons of new pods or phyto in the system to try and compete, a UV might be contraindicated. those are rarer ways though
to be constant in hand removing is to be opposite of the method that allows the initial invasion, after hitchhiking in, in my opinion.
the UV combined with the hand removal is the best move one can do in a dinos invasion hands down, while working all the newer approaches. Id never feel right in any sort of tank invasion that didn't have a high element of human elbow grease, it would feel like I was cheating something.
Amazon is a perfect place to buy UV, less a stocking fee they accept returns just like the goggles I bought, or the laptop, this is the business model that makes them billions. buy without fear, buy large and oversized bigtime. I can guarantee if I had a large tank, id have a UV in the closet that would not be sent back, for a pond. its not meant to look pretty as a constant install, its a closeted war machine that when needed I don't care if it looks like a solid rocket booster across the front its there for a burn job then it can be taken back down. I once ran a 75 gallon that way in 1996 but ended up never taking it down and just installing a pond sterilizer behind the tank, ran for a decade. such a good cheat.
For the rarer times someone is dumping gallons of new pods or phyto in the system to try and compete, a UV might be contraindicated. those are rarer ways though
to be constant in hand removing is to be opposite of the method that allows the initial invasion, after hitchhiking in, in my opinion.
the UV combined with the hand removal is the best move one can do in a dinos invasion hands down, while working all the newer approaches. Id never feel right in any sort of tank invasion that didn't have a high element of human elbow grease, it would feel like I was cheating something.
Amazon is a perfect place to buy UV, less a stocking fee they accept returns just like the goggles I bought, or the laptop, this is the business model that makes them billions. buy without fear, buy large and oversized bigtime. I can guarantee if I had a large tank, id have a UV in the closet that would not be sent back, for a pond. its not meant to look pretty as a constant install, its a closeted war machine that when needed I don't care if it looks like a solid rocket booster across the front its there for a burn job then it can be taken back down. I once ran a 75 gallon that way in 1996 but ended up never taking it down and just installing a pond sterilizer behind the tank, ran for a decade. such a good cheat.
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Bret Brinkmann
Well-Known Member
One additional thought. Is there a relationship between PO4 and NO3 that results in the reduction of one if the other is dosed?
Randy this might be a ridiculous question but are all food grade products the same strength?It's likely a fine product if you want to add both, but my recommendation is food grade products such as sodium/potassium nitrate and phosphate so you know what you are actually dosing.
If so what amount per litre should be mixed and any close approximation to the amount it will add?
Lol he goes by many names. I'll just call him John its easier that way.It is my understanding that the toxins are released into the water also. Therefore GAC should help. My snails started dying and getting lazy(er than normal
I think he is trying encourage good testing habits for all parameters not just nutrients. It is also good to know what the big 3 are doing in terms of establishing a healthy reef system. My main question is this, is his name Matthew or Mike?
You have hit the minimum level for PO4 and are within the recommended range for NO3. Just maintain those levels and wait it out. Things should get better I the long run (months) but may look worse for the first week or two.
Raise the nutrients (PO4 and NO3) to the recommended levels and maintain them from here on out. Stop heavily feeding and revert to normal feeding. Food adds C in addition to the other two nutrients which will slow down the beneficial effects of dosing inorganic nutrients.
Do NOT resume WC. Replacing the water you worked to get the proper nutrient amounts into with water that doesn't have those levels is counterproductive. Even if you match those levels by dosing your WC water you are really just creating unnecessary work for yourself.
Get a UV that will give you at least 1/2 Watts per gallon. But the closer you get to 2 Watts per gallon the better it will work from what I've read. Better to go oversized than risk going undersized and it not working. Don't be afraid to get a cheaper unit that is bigger. Run it through the DT to improve effectiveness. Reduce your light on time to help keep them in the water column longer which will improve the effectiveness of the UV. Also blowing off the rocks will help keep them in the water longer for the UV to reduce their numbers even faster.
I guess your tang loves algae that much.
My amphidiniun dinos are in my sand too. I have 4" deep. I plan on keeping my sand in the tank while correcting nutrients. They only go about 1-2" deep. Mostly just under the surface. If nutrient correction keeps them at bay then why take out the sand? It may take a little longer to get rid of them from what I've read but once you knock them back to a certain point they stay off your corals and rocks. Which is really what we care about right? Just curious, not trying to convince you to go either way. Maybe your answer will make me want to remove my sand.
Right OK understand now on the alk, cal and mg. I was beginning to wonder whether that had an other factor.
Really carbon, yes it's important to remove it from the water column. What I was saying is that the reason the mithrax copped it is they are grazing on the rocks and undoubtedly injesting cells.
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