Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?

[BurgerFish]

How long UV must work a day? 12h is OK (at night) or 24h is better to clean dinos?

ps. AA Green Killing Machine 9W is really noisy

 

[dwest]

How long UV must work a day? 12h is OK (at night) or 24h is better to clean dinos?

ps. AA Green Killing Machine 9W is really noisy

I’d go 24/7 unless water temp gets too high or noise is very bothersome. Hopefully this is relatively short term and you can deal with noise.

 

[mcarroll]

• So to begin with, make sure you have Dinos – you should have multiple factors at work...these factors were mentioned in the first section above. The less these factors seem to describe your tank, the less likely any of this advice will be correct for your situation – so post questions!
  • no special equipment is needed to confirm whether your algae sample has dino's and/or other algae
  • Use @taricha's dino confirmation guide on posts #986-987.

• Once you have confirmed that you have dino's you should ideally figure out what type(s) your tank is hosting. (Multiple species blooms seem almost as common as single-strain blooms.)
  • A basic 1200x microscope will be useful and doesn't have to be fancier than a $15 toy scope. Even a $50 scope is a lot nicer, if you think you might be more serious about it.
  • See: Selecting a microscope for more discussion.

This is the main section I was referring to.

(Click the link. Then click the SEARCH button at the bottom of the search page.)

• ostreopsis
  • Consider focusing first on posts #86 and #905
• prorocentrum
• amphidinium
  • Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods (they are unique and somewhat more experimental)
• coolia
• (other searches coming)

If you're referring to these then they are search links...the form you get will be pre-populated for the search, but you have to scroll down and click the SEARCH button to execute the query.

 

[danoo]

Dispatches from my continued battle with Ostreopsis in my new tank:

(There is also small cell amphidinium, and maybe I'm still being naive, but I'm ignoring them for now and only worrying about the Ostreopsis)

For the first time since things started trending downward about 3-4 weeks ago, things are trending well.

For the past 4 weeks I've been dosing Silica, but on its own that didn't seem to be fixing anything. I had my worst ever bloom days of Ostreopsis after dosing huge amounts of Silica.

Two weeks ago when things were trending worse I suspected I did not have enough flow through my UV, and some replies in this thread helped confirm that. At the time in my ~350 gallon tank I had about 600-700 gph of return going through 114 watts of UV, and 300 watts of return going straight to the tank.

Well I replumbed everything and split up my UVs, so I had about 900 gph going through 57 watts and another 300 gph going through my other 57 watt. The next day the Ostreopsis bloom was the biggest yet. I quasi-panicked, ordered another 57 watt unit and did a one day lights off after that.

When the other 57 watt unit arrived, I plumbed that into the return so I had 900 gph going through 114 watts, and 300 gph going through the 57 watts. The next few days weren't great, but they weren't as bad as before.

Potential lesson: Anecdotally it seems like 500 gph through 57 watts is good, 900 gph through 57 watts might be too much flow. Maybe 1 watt per 10 gph of speed might be a good benchmark for UV.

Then HT to @wangspeed who mentioned that he had to change his returns because a lot of return water was going straight into the overflow. I realized that my return patterns were also basically just shooting return water into turbulent flow from my MP60s where a lot was coming right back into the overflow, so I redid the return lines to go below the turbulence zones and just watching food shoot around it is clear this was a vast improvement.

Definite Lesson: If your UV is in between your sump --> DT, make sure your return flow pattern is good and not going straight back into the overflow

And then finally after I did this, I upgraded the pump on my other return and all the plumbing on both to maximize gph, and now I have 1000gph going through 114 watts, and 550 gph going through 57 watts.

It isn't necessarily like the Ostreopsis were gone in a day, but it is clear that everyday since I've had this setup has been better than the last. This includes looking at samples under the microscope all throughout the day.

Definite lesson: You must have adequate tank volume cycling through your UV for it to matter. It seems like at least 3-4x is necessary.

Other things:

- I never got phosphates as high as 0.1. They've stayed between 0.03 and 0.05 this whole time (though I am dosing them everyday to keep them above 0). Nitrates have stayed pretty steady around 5, but I dose a couple ppm every now and again when they seemed to drop below that level.

- I think Silica dosing is a good idea, though on its own this isn't going to beat Ostreopsis. Under the microscope my hair algae are *covered* in all sorts of different diatoms, which was not the case in the pre-silica days. But this isn't a problem, as my massive clean up crew is happily mowing down the hair algae and diatoms.

- Speaking of clean-up crew, I think nerite snails, or any other snails that do all their work at night, are a great option if you are battling Ostreopsis. I haven't seen any noticeable snail death while I've seen my snails devouring lots of algae, because I think the snails are doing their work at night while the Ostreopsis is in the water column. Or maybe Nerite snails just know what to avoid. Either way they are devouring tons of algae while not dying.

So right now slowly but surely the rocks are getting slowly cleaned of hair algae, and dino population are clearly going down, and I'm just going to keep everything the same and see what happens. I don't know if they'll eventually go away completely or make a horrible comeback or something in between, but I'm a little cautiously optimistic.

 

[mcarroll]

@danoo that's great news!!

Potential lesson: Anecdotally it seems like 500 gph through 57 watts is good, 900 gph through 57 watts might be too much flow. Maybe 1 watt per 10 gph of speed might be a good benchmark for UV.

UV can be different from make to make, so pay attention to instructions included with the unit. For our purposes, we always want UV flow to be at the bottom of the maker's recommended range, otherwise it won't affect something as large and protected as dino's.

Running X watts per gallons and sticking to the maker's flow range should do it in almost all cases.

I think we've found that X = 2 or 3 if I recall correctly.

I never got phosphates as high as 0.1. They've stayed between 0.03 and 0.05 this whole time

Based on experimentation that @taricha did, you'll get much less effect from the levels you've been maintaining compared to the recommended level of 0.10 ppm.

There's no good reason to hold back from maintaining ≥ 0.10 ppm unless you're just doing it for experimentation's sake.

Ostreopsis does seem to have a cue to scale down their bloom along with declining nutrient levels....so making a peak for the levels to decline from may carry some added importance with them.

 

[danoo]

@danoo that's great news!!

UV can be different from make to make, so pay attention to instructions included with the unit. For our purposes, we always want UV flow to be at the bottom of the maker's recommended range, otherwise it won't affect something as large and protected as dino's.

Running X watts per gallons and sticking to the maker's flow range should do it in almost all cases.

I think we've found that X = 2 or 3 if I recall correctly.

Yeah we went over that a couple weeks ago in this post. According to the specs, the 57 watt AquaUV unit @ 1200gph delivers the 90,000 uw/cm2, which is their highest kill rate.

But in my anecdotal evidence, I went from ~800 gph @ 114 watts and ~300 gph @ 0 watts to ~1000 gph at 57 watts and ~400 gph at 57 watts, and the Dinos got much worse the next day. Assuming this is enough dosage, I basically went from 800 gph of UV to 1400 gph of UV, which I expected to make things much better, but in fact they got noticably worse.

As I said in the earlier post, at that point I panicked, bought another UV and did a one day blackout (and got and installed the UV the next day), so I'm not sure if that trend would have continued, but I think it is at least strong anecdotal data that the 90,000 dosage isn't enough. There is a past post from Beardo that also sort of suggests this.

I wish I had more scientific data, but I just didn't want to risk the dinos taking over again and was willing to throw more UV at it than risk the dosage not being high enough. And it did seem to work, but again I don't know how much of that was the UV, and how much of that was a combination of other things.

Based on experimentation that @taricha did, you'll get much less effect from the levels you've been maintaining compared to the recommended level of 0.10 ppm.

There's no good reason to hold back from maintaining ≥ 0.10 ppm unless you're just doing it for experimentation's sake.

Ostreopsis does seem to have a cue to scale down their bloom along with declining nutrient levels....so making a peak for the levels to decline from may carry some added importance with them.

That is interesting. I'll keep that in mind for the future. I'm currently dosing about 0.04 ppm worth of phosphates everyday (spaced out evenly through the day) so clearly there is a high rate of consumption in the tank, but it does seem to get all used up. I actually normally test a few hours after the lights go off, maybe tomorrow I'll test in the morning and see what the levels are before the lights come on. Maybe they do hit the higher levels during the night.

 

[taricha]

Took these last week when I still thought it was Diatoms. Only started thinking Dino’s when my snails started dying off.

Hmmm.... yeah, definitely amphidinium. I keep wondering if you have something else mixed in providing the toxin.
I'd continue to take samples of brown under the microscope, to see what else is in there.
Amphidinium of course CAN be toxic, but almost no reports of toxin deaths in aquariums from amphidinium outbreaks.

I mean they definitely aren't yummy. Very few things eat them, and those that do, don't eat many of them.
It's possible they are following nutrient pattern more commonly seen in other dinos - nutrient stress leading to toxin production.

Wanna give us tank details and test parameters? I'm curious.

 

[mcarroll]

Hmmm.... yeah, definitely amphidinium. [...] I mean they definitely aren't yummy. Very few things eat them, and those that do, don't eat many of them.
It's possible they are following nutrient pattern more commonly seen in other dinos - nutrient stress leading to toxin production.

This may be the same thing you're saying (and maybe even a repeat idea) but I wonder if Amphidinium's "local" access to substrate-oriented detrital nutrient sources accounts at all for their apparent lack of toxicity during "outbreaks"? Maybe they don't starve enough to go toxic compared to the others that enter the water column?

 

[Jeff Sawyer]

Hmmm.... yeah, definitely amphidinium. I keep wondering if you have something else mixed in providing the toxin.
I'd continue to take samples of brown under the microscope, to see what else is in there.
Amphidinium of course CAN be toxic, but almost no reports of toxin deaths in aquariums from amphidinium outbreaks.

I mean they definitely aren't yummy. Very few things eat them, and those that do, don't eat many of them.
It's possible they are following nutrient pattern more commonly seen in other dinos - nutrient stress leading to toxin production.

Wanna give us tank details and test parameters? I'm curious.

First thank you for all you're doing here. I'm a newbie and the info you and others have provided on this topic is beyond appreciated.

This week is crazy at work but should level off after this week. Which is why I went with a blackout just to try to buy some time.

If I'm understanding you correctly I think I probably did stress them out, (which maybe what made them go toxic?). I think I had, had them a long time several months thinking they were diatoms (with no noticeable toxicity). My nitrates had been 0 or just barely above for a very long time but my Phosphates had been very high, and I was starting to get some GHA so I added GFO. After adding the GFO the Phosphates dropped from .78 to .02 within a week. I'm constantly monitoring phosphates now and they are all over the place (up one day down the next), since I added the GFO I've measured everything from .02 to .33 ppm (Hanna Checker). After adding the GFO is when the snails started dying, then a few days after that I saw several micro brittle stars floating.

I will write up a more detailed post, with tank specifics and parameters when things slow down a bit at work.

I've also got some ideas about a DIY amphidinium torture chamber...we'll see how that goes. Again thanks.

 

[LPStandard]

Hi everyone!
Can anyone confirm dinos for me? @taricha

Look like Amphidinium to my eyes, but not sure if they're small or large. Visible grid in the pic is 5mm square, if that helps.
My scope is only 250x.

My tank is about 6 months wet. Had a nitrate result of 0 for the past few months, and just got a ulr hanna phosphorus tester. I also picked up some NeoNitro and NeoPhos after doing a little reading.
Dinos are all over my rock and sandbed, fairly thick. I'll grab tank shots tomorrow.
Corals and snails are fairly unaffected (which leads also to my Amphidinium suspicion). Just tired of the ugly brown goo hahah

 

[LPStandard]

Discovered that I could focus quite a bit closer!

 

[danoo]

Just curious, is that based on visual or microscopic examination?

Now I have an answer to the question "can dinos live in an ATS"! I cleaned out my ATS yesterday and put some of the algae under the microscope.

For background: My tank right now has a (fingers crossed!) heavily declining population of Ostreopsis, but a still relatively robust population of amphidinium. Right now my ATS is about 80% diatoms and 20% hair algae, as it is just a little over a month old and still maturing.

I looked at samples around the hair algae and samples of the diatoms, and I did find a few scattered Ostreopsis cells. I did not see any clumps of them, which may or may not be meaningful since I can't really find any clumps in the display tank either. So they clearly *can* live in the ATS, but based on past experience when I did have a bloom happening they didn't appear to be overtaking it.

A couple interesting things were I couldn't find any amphidinium in there (or at least any active amphidinium), even though I can easily find them in my tank. And the other interesting thing was the *shocking* amount of biodiversity in there. Just all sort of single and multi-celled creatures buzzing around, and the diversity of diatoms was also pretty staggering, it was like a kaleidoscope of different species. Silica dosing for the win!

This picture is a good indication of what it was like, where you can see a few scattered Ostreopsis cells among hundreds of diatoms.

 

[danoo]

Discovered that I could focus quite a bit closer!

What was their movement like? Can you post a video of them moving around?

Some of those really look more like Ostreopsis to me, but its hard to tell.

 

[Punchanello]

Hi All,

I got my first and only reef tank wet in March and cycled my formerly live, dry rock. I cycled the tank without a skimmer and didn't actually add one until June due to lack of stock and freight delays. It was a relatively normal cycle except that my nitrates (and presumably phosphates) were off the chart for weeks. After my nitrates dropped to zero I added a couple of small fish, added some chaeto under a bulb and started to see hair algae on my rocks almost immediately. I fed conservatively while I was waiting on my skimmer. Before it arrived I got the mother of all phytoplankton blooms. I tried everything including large, almost continuous water changes with no result. In the end, around the same time my skimmer arrived, I used a UV sterilizer which cleared the phyto in a week. A week later (late July) my N and P readings were zero and the remaining hair algae started dying off and I was manually removing the rest.

On Monday, seemingly out of nowhere every bit of the remaining hair algae in the DT was covered in slimy, stringy red/rust coloured stuff with bubbles in it. I assume dinoflagellates but I've ordered a microscope and find out. My N and P readings are still zeroed out. I find this part pretty surprising as algae, either waterborne or on the rocks, has been pretty much a constant until the last few weeks where it has been dying off or I have scraped off an hasn't come back. I have a 130 gallon DT. Two small clowns, a small tang, a large blennie and one adult sailfin anthias. I feed small amounts 3 or 4 times a day. Every two or three days I feed my LPS with reef roids. In fact, I always feel like I am overfeeding, yet, my algae is dying and my nutients are low.

I should also mention that the dinos appeared about 1-2 weeks after I took my UV sterilizer offline. Not sure there is a correlation though.

I wanted to share where I am at. I've read quite a lot of this thread although not all. It's hard to know where to start because this thread is chock-full of info. But I thought I would just share my experience and get some advice on what I should be looking for and what steps to take next to deal with the outbreak.

 

[danoo]

I should also mention that the dinos appeared about 1-2 weeks after I took my UV sterilizer offline. Not sure there is a correlation though.

Well until you have your microscope and can positively identify the dinos, let me say that for certain types of dinos, a UV sterilizer is by far the most effective method of control, so I think a correlation is pretty likely in your case. Turn the UV sterilizer back on and run some fresh carbon while waiting for your microscope.

 

[mcarroll]

Turn the UV sterilizer back on and run some fresh carbon while waiting for your microscope.

My N and P readings are still zeroed out.

If your nutrients are zeroed then you can almost rest assured it's dino's. There are some non-scope verification tests linked in the first post that you can use.

Correcting the nutrient situation in the tank is actually of prime importance as it's the real root of the issue.

If you don't have N and P fertilizers, you'll need them. Brightwell or Seachem are popular options, but DIY or other brands should be fine too. Post what you have available if there's any question.

(Again, see info in the first post. Helpful cleanup tools like UV and micron filtration should not be looked at as an actual solution. They are more or less interchangeable tools with a specific purpose serving our overall goal of growing more than just dino's! )

 

[Punchanello]

Thanks @danoo and @mcarroll. As I mentioned I'm new to reefing. I have planned and researched for a long time before starting and I fully expected that high nutrients would be the struggle. Not low Nitates and Phosphates!

I wonder also if in removing the phytoplankton with UV I have removed other organisms that would compete with the dinos?

I feel like i need to move quickly here because my gonis in particular seem really irritated the dino's presence.

 

[mcarroll]

I wonder also if in removing the phytoplankton with UV I have removed other organisms that would compete with the dinos?

Using UV on a new tank is definitely counter to your (and the tank's) goals. You want everything you have to spread and populate those rocks....the sooner it all gets through the phases of "ugly" and starts growing coraline, the better.

Plus a phyto bloom doesn't hurt anything so there really was no compelling reason to take action against it.

I feel like i need to move quickly here because my gonis in particular seem really irritated the dino's presence.

Activated carbon will remove any toxins from the water in case that's what's irritating the coral.

But if they're growing on the coral, that's not the toxins in the water – you need to stop the bloom.

That takes nutrients consistently in the water.

≥ 0.10 ppm of phosphate and ≥ 5-10 ppm of nitrate

Test an hour after your dose to see if it's all used up. Dose again as needed to keep those levels. Initial usage can be staggering – a lot – so don't be surprised. Dose as-needed, based on testing.

 

[Punchanello]

Yeah, I was hesitant about the skimmer but this was what I was dealing with and I'd exhaust my other options -

 

[LPStandard]

What was their movement like? Can you post a video of them moving around?

Some of those really look more like Ostreopsis to me, but its hard to tell.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Some of the movement may be water currents in my sample drop, but you can see them swimming a bit.

Also discovered this guy! No clue, but fun to watch!

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>