Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?

[fuelman]

The conventional, tried/true method for ostreopsis:
a) Raise NO3 and PO4 to >10 and >.1 respectively. NYOS test, Hanna ULR test. You may be shocked at how much PO4 you need to dose.
b) Install a UV to/from the affected display (not sump). 1 watt per 3 gallons. 300-400 GPH is OK. Slower if you can.
c) No aminos at all. No GFO. Skim dry. No carbon dosing. No water changes.
d) Run activated carbon; ostreos are toxic
e) Manual removal: blow them off often. Clamp filter floss in high light / high flow areas. Think 4" X 12" strips. Rinse each night.
f) Optional but helpful is 36hr blackout

Once you get some competing green algae and cyano going, you will know you are getting close.

Post your experiences back here.

If you do ALL of this, you will see improvement in days.

i moved the uv into the DT. dosed po4 up to 1.2 no3 was already at 12ppm. turned the white channel off & reduced the blue channel from 9 to 5 hours per day. clamped filter floss in front of power heads. siphoned out into filter sock in sump daily. blow off the whole tank several times per day. after about 3-4 day no more dino's were visible i moved the uv to the sump 3 days ago & no visible dino's still, hopefully for good.

 

[Mark]

Try slowly raising your temperature to 82 degrees F. Several of us saw dinos disappear fully after 7 days. 82 degrees used to be a normal tank temp in the metal halide days. Corals are quite happy at that temp. Seems a lot easier and less complicated than taping garbage bags to blackout your tank, running UV, or some of the other methods.

Thanks to @hankacrank for discovering this:

Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods

@taricha after about 3 days the sand is brown and i stir it up then 3 days later the sand is brown.. not like before where the dinos came back immediately Sounds like you are slowly turning things around. Let us know what the microscope says.

www.reef2reef.com

 

[ScottB]

Im still struggling with mine the first round killed half my tank, all my acros and also took out all the algee. Got the UV up and running for about 2 months, things were good for a month but now im seeing a few strings of Dinos appear again mid day. Had a couple days where Nitrates dropped to 2-3 and since then ive been seeing taces of Dinos.

Currently hovering around 8 Nitrate .15 PO4. Dosing silicate at 1ml for 1ml/200Ml H2O 40% sodium silicate, running 15w AquaUV in DT, running tank at 77F and running carbon. For a 35 gal system bare bottom. Ideas/Suggestions on what else I can do? Black out seems to work for a few days but after that it comes back and I dont want it to get a foothold again. So Far alk consumption is stable and going up but the presense of stringy Dinos really worries me.

I don't recall which dino you have, but if I let PO4 drop below .03-.04 I will get a resurgence of ostreopsis.

Your current nutrient numbers look sufficient. Try to confirm that your UV bulb is still good amd <12 months old. Avoid amino dosing completely.

As to H2O2 if you feel it had a role in knocking back dinos OK. But I feel like H202 is an indiscriminate oxidizer that can kill good and bad organisms. Just my opinion; others seem to have used it effectively.

 

[Gildo]

Short story to be taken with the "pliers".

Years ago I had a 150 liter nano-reef. chock full of dinoflagellates. I had to open the window often for the bad smell. one day they magically disappeared and after a short time the tank started to turn normally. and I have never seen them again, despite having a management with no3 and po4 close to 0 (I have never dosed no3 or po4 or UV).

Yesterday I chatted with a friend of mine, and he says do you still have the aquarium?
I do
ahh because xxx told me that before leaving he spilled some codeggina in the aquarium to make you a spite.

At the time this xxx person lived with me and for various reasons went away. And the miraculous healing of the aquarium corresponds to the period my friend was talking about.

Now I don't say let's pour the bleach into the aquarium .... but it could be a starting point to think about.

 

[hotdrop]

Try slowly raising your temperature to 82 degrees F. Several of us saw dinos disappear fully after 7 days. 82 degrees used to be a normal tank temp in the metal halide days. Corals are quite happy at that temp. Seems a lot easier and less complicated than taping garbage bags to blackout your tank, running UV, or some of the other methods.

Thanks to @hankacrank for discovering this:

Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods

@taricha after about 3 days the sand is brown and i stir it up then 3 days later the sand is brown.. not like before where the dinos came back immediately Sounds like you are slowly turning things around. Let us know what the microscope says.

www.reef2reef.com

Interesting raise the temp instead of lower it.... I am seeing green spots of pest algee show up in my DT so maybe I should hang tight and see what happens in the next month.

 

[NS Mike D]

anyone take a stab and let me know if this is a dino

Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?

If Dino's aren't moving is that death or they just don't wanna move? Lol. Finished the wasteaway bottle. So I'm done with that. I didn't dose silicate last night because I ran out. New bottle came today and the girl though it would be better to slowly ween off silicate than cut cold turkey...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[AaronFReef]

These are Coolia. Do they appear lighter at lights-on and then get brown-er as lights are on for a few hours? If so, then We need to figure out why the UV didn't irradiate them.

Yes they are lighter at night but still present. My filter socks are full of them in the morning as evidenced by microscope and the reddish tinge to the water in the bowl I place the sock. My UV is a 15w AquaUV advantage run on a MJ600 in the display. I tried running a Jebao 55w bazooka for a while before it started disintegrating plastic into my system after a couple months. At this point it’s been running non stop for 9 months in the display. I do have two old 40w AquaUV classics in need of repair I might try and get working to see if I can’t send them to hades in a carcinogenic hellstorm if the spare parts aren’t an arm and a leg.

thus far my best luck has been through manual siphoning when they get thick and changing filter socks every morning to manually remove many. My silicates are extremely high according to ICP from dosing it heavily last year (and a bit last month) and GFO perhaps. My nitrate are 10ppm and my PO4 is always greater than 0.07 ppm usually closer to 0.10. Some bryopsis on the rocks and some red creeping macroalgae but that’s it. Never seen cyano or diatoms in any heavy concentration.

 

[Killer Reefs]

A couple Quick questions... How should I deal with the Cyano after eliminating the Dino’s without causing another Dino outbreak??

Dino’s have disappeared after maintaining steady Nitrates at 10ppm and Steady Phosphates at .10 now I have small patches of Cyano appearing.
Should I start to lower my phosphates back to a normal range after Dino’s disappear?

Before I try chemiclean or Vibrant, I ordered pods from Algae barn to see if the Cyano leaves naturally.
Do you guys think this will kick back the Cyano?

 

[taricha]

if you can take a look as ID these critters

They look like probably prorocentrum to me.

Ideas/Suggestions on what else I can do? Black out seems to work for a few days but after that it comes back and I dont want it to get a foothold again. So Far alk consumption is stable and going up but the presense of stringy Dinos really worries me.

This situation (a few strings and bubbles) is a good case for hanging filter floss in high flow.
click through to this post for details

Poor Man's UV
I wanted to (re)post this, as recently I've seen a couple of people with massive populations of dinos who are not apparently doing any real export. And this idea seems to have been lost in the depths of a few thousand posts.

Yesterday I chatted with a friend of mine, and he says do you still have the aquarium?
I do
ahh because xxx told me that before leaving he spilled some codeggina in the aquarium to make you a spite.

help us out. I come up with nothing on a web search or translate for that word. What got poured in your tank? a disinfectant?

Yes they are lighter at night but still present. My filter socks are full of them in the morning as evidenced by microscope and the reddish tinge to the water in the bowl I place the sock. My UV is a 15w AquaUV advantage run on a MJ600 in the display. I tried running a Jebao 55w bazooka for a while before it started disintegrating plastic into my system after a couple months. At this point it’s been running non stop for 9 months in the display. I do have two old 40w AquaUV classics in need of repair I might try and get working to see if I can’t send them to hades in a carcinogenic hellstorm if the spare parts aren’t an arm and a leg.

This makes no sense. definitive that they enter the water, but multiple UV units showing little progress.
hmmm.....

My silicates are extremely high according to ICP from dosing it heavily last year (and a bit last month)

What is extremely high? 0.10 to 1.0 ppm Si is a fine range if trying to have Si and let some diatoms grow. (1ppm might get reported as 1000 ppb or micrograms/L on ICP.)

A couple Quick questions... How should I deal with the Cyano after eliminating the Dino’s without causing another Dino outbreak??

I prefer conservative on cyano. repeated vacuumings. Cyano itself contains lots of nutrients (try putting a healthy chunk of cyano in a closed container - open in a couple of days and be knocked back by the ammonia smell), and cyano also enmeshes lots of particulate organics in its mat. If you suction any mats you see, you're removing cyano, and cleaning the organics from the bed at the same time. If the cyano re-appears, it's telling you that there's still a lot of stuff there worth exporting.

 

[dwest]

A couple Quick questions... How should I deal with the Cyano after eliminating the Dino’s without causing another Dino outbreak??

Dino’s have disappeared after maintaining steady Nitrates at 10ppm and Steady Phosphates at .10 now I have small patches of Cyano appearing.
Should I start to lower my phosphates back to a normal range after Dino’s disappear?

Before I try chemiclean or Vibrant, I ordered pods from Algae barn to see if the Cyano leaves naturally.
Do you guys think this will kick back the Cyano?

My cyano has been going away real slow after my dinos. But it is going away with regular tank maintenance. Did I say it was slow?

 

[phatduckk]

My story is buried somewhere in this thread. but TL;DR update

• had small cell amphidinium dinos in my coral QT tank
• removed all sand & rock
• raised nutrients
• ran all the water through a 5 micro sock

That seemingly worked; 5 or 6 frags STN'd through all the instability tho

Eventually my nutrients bottomed out again and I got ostreopsis. I put a massively oversized UV in... that seemed to help a lot!

Things settled in and it looked like the dinos we're under control but the tank was covered in algae. The last step was to move frags over to a new tank pre-dosed to 5 nitrates and .04 phos (so far, so good). I also seeded it with a bunch of > 5 months old Matrix and Marine Pure from my "clean" DT... last step was adding a small bottle of Dt Tims just for some extra bac.

Finally, I poured a cup of bleach into the tank. God, that was satisfying!!!! seeing all the algae bubble & melt away over a few days was fun... the water, though poisonous, is crystal clear now lol

 

[AaronFReef]

This makes no sense. definitive that they enter the water, but multiple UV units showing little progress.
hmmm.....

What is extremely high? 0.10 to 1.0 ppm Si is a fine range if trying to have Si and let some diatoms grow. (1ppm might get reported as 1000 ppb or micrograms/L on ICP.)
.

Right? Why didn’t it nuke them. Drives me crazy. I had 0.9 ppm on my last ICP (893 micrograms per liter). I talked with AquaUV today and am working on getting my 16 year old 40w 2” UV rebuilt to try.

 

[Gildo]

help us out. I come up with nothing on a web search or translate for that word. What got poured in your tank? a disinfectant?

normal sodium hypochlorite

 

[Gildo]

normal sodium hypochlorite

if I want to start experimenting in a dedicated tank, what percentages do you think shouldn't be fatal for fish and sps? 5ml/100 liters?

 

[taricha]

if I want to start experimenting in a dedicated tank, what percentages do you think shouldn't be fatal for fish and sps? 5ml/100 liters?

This has already been done years ago. Yes. people dosed bleach into their tanks for dinos. In some cases the dino outbreaks weren't even clearly toxic .
Please read the accounts instead of trying this. And for the safety of livestock, please don't bump those threads. There's quite a bit of fish loss in those threads.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/dinos-bleach-testing.285887/

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/d...cure-follow-along-and-see.253917/post-3571776

 

[Mark]

After running the tank at 82.5 for a week and half and seeing all the Dino's vaporize, I've reduced my temp down to 80.5 out of curiousity to see if Dino's stay gone. So far so good. I may then leave that as my new normal temperature, rather than 78 degrees.

 

[Gildo]

This has already been done years ago. Yes. people dosed bleach into their tanks for dinos. In some cases the dino outbreaks weren't even clearly toxic .
Please read the accounts instead of trying this. And for the safety of livestock, please don't bump those threads. There's quite a bit of fish loss in those threads.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/dinos-bleach-testing.285887/

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/d...cure-follow-along-and-see.253917/post-3571776

thanks!
is that I am really discouraged ... every time I seem to have won, the ostreopsis come back, and every time they seem stronger and more difficult to remove! 10 days ago they had disappeared, I could not find them anywhere under the microscope, filter floss had been clean for a week. then a distraction or I do not know what and they are back! and stronger than before! so I wanted to try this extreme road with hypochlorite! I've been going on like this for over a year now!

 

[becon776]

whatever happened to the ulva and phytotoxin that inhibits dino growth?

 

[Mark]

thanks!
is that I am really discouraged ... every time I seem to have won, the ostreopsis come back, and every time they seem stronger and more difficult to remove! 10 days ago they had disappeared, I could not find them anywhere under the microscope, filter floss had been clean for a week. then a distraction or I do not know what and they are back! and stronger than before! so I wanted to try this extreme road with hypochlorite! I've been going on like this for over a year now!

Have you tried raising your tank temperature to 82.5 for a few weeks?

 

[Gildo]

Have you tried raising your tank temperature to 82.5 for a few weeks?

not yet, I'm starting to do it slowly, did you do it immediately? I am raising half a degree a day