Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?

[Beardo]

I have not verified them yet. i plan to do that today. at this point im only assuming it is ostreopsis because that was what i battled last time.

I ran my UV for 2-months before pulling both the sand and UV out of my system.

I was just curious, I've seen a number of cases where the initial dominant type of dino was taken care of only to have another type show up. But also with the encysting dinos seen the same kind come back months later.

I can't really comment on if and how much a UV is detrimental to the platonic life in a reef tank. I personally run my UV continuously. I did shut it off for a few weeks after running it for about 2 months but started seeing a few Coolia back in my system so turned it back on. I attribute it to encysted dinos "hatching" as I have found a number of encysted dinos. With dino cysts being able to hang out for many months I feel it is worth running UV long enough for any cysts to "hatch"

 

[wopadobop]

Interestingly enough. I had a heater failure last night. Tank got down to 73 degrees. All my sps are super pale! But , all of the Dino’s are practically mia.
So temp definitely plays a part here.

 

[Oberst Oswald]

I get my UV Unit today. I see on here about 10 0r 5 micron filter socks... where do you get these? I checked Amazon and the lowest 7" filter socks is 100 microns. If you could a link please.

 

[fishbox]

I get my UV Unit today. I see on here about 10 0r 5 micron filter socks... where do you get these? I checked Amazon and the lowest 7" filter socks is 100 microns. If you could a link please.

There was a link posted a few pages back

 

[IKD]

I get my UV Unit today. I see on here about 10 0r 5 micron filter socks... where do you get these? I checked Amazon and the lowest 7" filter socks is 100 microns. If you could a link please.

Can you go larger than 7"? I grabbed mine here. They have a couple sizes but smallest was 14"

http://www.aquariumspecialty.com/blue-life-usa-10-micron-filter-socks.html

 

[Paullawr]

Interestingly enough. I had a heater failure last night. Tank got down to 73 degrees. All my sps are super pale! But , all of the Dino’s are practically mia.
So temp definitely plays a part here.

That's interesting. I know I've had all of my blooms when it's got really warm. And some telltale signs of dino's in my new tank also went Mia when I inadvertently turned on ato when the water was straight from outside and rather chilly. Knocked a few degrees off temp.

 

[Oberst Oswald]

Thank you for link. They have the 7" opening that I use. Hopefully the socks will catch the dead bodies that die off and some of the live DNA altered ones too. If this don't work I'm going to have to do a "Rip Clean" and all new sand that has been recommended by brandon429. How I hate these things...

 

[five.five-six]

I really should post a video of how I built my 2 sock + paper towels dino trap contraption because about 95% of Dino’s will go right through a 100 micron sock. My Dino’s measured at about 40 microns and my contraption trapped better than 70% of them.

 

[Jolanta]

One day with UV and for the first time from many weeks my sarcophyton dont have brown strings in between the polyps.

My corals loon more open

But still dinos visible in the tank. Some rocks look better
Before

After

We will see. Wish me luck.

 

[Beardo]

I get my UV Unit today. I see on here about 10 0r 5 micron filter socks... where do you get these? I checked Amazon and the lowest 7" filter socks is 100 microns. If you could a link please.

Here is where I purchased 1 micron filter socks from
http://www.dudadiesel.com/search.php?query=+filter++bag&i=filterbags

 

[zachxlutz]

One day with UV and for the first time from many weeks my sarcophyton dont have brown strings in between the polyps.

My corals loon more open

But still dinos visible in the tank. Some rocks look better
Before

After

We will see. Wish me luck.

That looks like major progress to me! Watch those nutrient levels with all that die off of dinos.

 

[Paullawr]

One day with UV and for the first time from many weeks my sarcophyton dont have brown strings in between the polyps.

My corals loon more open

But still dinos visible in the tank. Some rocks look better
Before

After

We will see. Wish me luck.

Good luck! About time you had some good luck. Looking good.

 

[Oberst Oswald]

I really should post a video of how I built my 2 sock + paper towels dino trap contraption because about 95% of Dino’s will go right through a 100 micron sock. My Dino’s measured at about 40 microns and my contraption trapped better than 70% of them.

Please do. I could use your "dino" trap while I'm waiting for socks.

 

[Jolanta]

I took a sample of some brown stuff and there is only few of ostreopsis but a lot of small roun cells, I cant see any movement. What are the small ones?

 

[wopadobop]

Going back and checking things out. Tank got down to 71 degrees during the night. Looking like a complete loss at this point. Uggggg.

Dinos all dead. Huge nutrient spike . Po4 ppb shot to 81 from 20.

Changed out my carbon and run a little al 99 for a day or two to bring that back in line. That’s around .2 ppm !

I just cant believe i beat the Dino’s only to be undone by a heater failure. I had two in there just in case and took it out to heat the saltwater to clean the Dino’s out of the fuge. Smh.

And things were doing so well a week ago!!!

 

[Reefnjunkie]

I'm fairly sure at this point that there's no such thing at all as shocking your corals by adding nitrates. (or phosphates.)

Agreed, it would be like feeding too much in a day.

Go crazy. I’ve dumped in 10ppm KNO3 and .2ppm PO4 in one go... at some points during my battle I would do that twice a day with phosphate and every few days with nitrates. If it was a shock to the coral, it was a positive shock that left them growing and colorful.

I would say if you are already near the low end of 1 ppm go slower. But like the others I’ve jumped 500 ml of that mix in my tank in a go with no bad results lol

Thanks for the replies and especially the “go slower” wopadobop

What about the one reefer that makes the jump from zero to 50 in a single dose, doesn’t that seem excessive- rhetorical question but someone may.

My dosing has been much more conservative out of caution/fear than anything else of the “unknown”. I would say I was on the low end , my Red Sea Pro kit looks like RO/DI water, so I’m close to undetectable.

It’s been 4 days and I’ve raised the NO3 to what I’d say is 2ppm. I’ve not seen or read that there is a target number so I’m just shooting for something between 5-10 for NO3 and .08-.12 for my PO4. My PO4 used to be 0 using a digital low range Milwaukee reader but feeding my fish heavily 2x a day has raised that to .10

What time frames have you all seen as far as signs of recession if not total reversal of Dino’s being present. I know the saying regarding reefing so I’m not remotely expecting anything fast. I’ve read s9me have seen improvements in a few days while others it’s been longer so any shared experiences is all I could expect.


The real stumper for me was I had this outbreak in a single frag tank and not others. The odd part to that is I have 4-frag tanks tied into the 1 sump that feeds my 400 gallon display. So I have 5 tanks all tied together using the same water yet only 1 tank of that 5 shows Dino’s.
To further complicate things, since someone may say different lights, flow or whatever besides the one Dino tank, the tank directly below has the identical 8bulb ATI fixture, using the exact same bulbs, exact same age of bulbs and both of the tanks each have 2 QD 40s for flow and are bare bottom-so they are about as close as I could say as identical yet one has Dino’s.

This has been going on for about 8 months as I described above and just recently I noticed signs it may be creeping into another frag tank which I sent ran by LED and different internal flow.



The intriguing question is why was it isolated to a single tank in a system that supports a total of 5 tanks using the same water source

Thanks again for the replies!

 

[Reefnjunkie]

Going back and checking things out. Tank got down to 71 degrees during the night. Looking like a complete loss at this point. Uggggg.

Dinos all dead. Huge nutrient spike . Po4 ppb shot to 81 from 20.

Changed out my carbon and run a little al 99 for a day or two to bring that back in line. That’s around .2 ppm !

I just cant believe i beat the Dino’s only to be undone by a heater failure. I had two in there just in case and took it out to heat the saltwater to clean the Dino’s out of the fuge. Smh.

And things were doing so well a week ago!!!

So sorry to just read that

 

[wopadobop]

Yeah it’s crazy man. I caught it pretty quick I think and made sure to bring it back slow over a few hours back to 78 . But everything is super ticked off. Could it be toxins ? I changed the carbon and upped the flow on that. Time will tell. Trying to keep the changes to minimum . The po4 spike is crazyyyyyy though right ?

 

[kinetic]

I've been dosing NO3/PO4 for a few days now. For awhile my PO4 never dropped, and my NO3 was constantly dropping from 2ppm down to 0. I switched to dosing 5ppm NO3 and my PO4 started dropping within 12 hours. Now my NO3 is plateauing and my PO4 is dropping pretty fast.

Lots more green algae, but dinos are continuing to grow a lot. Does this sound promising?

 

[five.five-six]

For some reason I got no audio on this one. Makeing another vid with narration.

Please do. I could use your "dino" trap while I'm waiting for socks.

Well, unfortunatly the contraption uses 2 socks. It was quite effective with my strain of Dino’s. It’s been a couple weeks and I have a couple spots of what might be Dino’s or diatoms but more feeding, thiscontraptionand 2 hrs of O3 a night seem to have done the trick