Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?

[mcarroll]

Here we go again.
Another picture of the bronze small cells.

Ideas fellas?

The color still suggests dino pigments....doubt that's very concrete though. Could as easily be something that ate dino's.

Any remarkable movement?

 

[m0jjen]

The color still suggests dino pigments....doubt that's very concrete though. Could as easily be something that ate dino's.

Any remarkable movement?

None what so ever. All the cells are still and everything is connected by some mucus

 

[mcarroll]

@m0jjen Still looks like a fair amount of green growing in the tank, so at least there's that. Do you vacuum the gravel and "blast clean" off the rocks when you do water changes, BTW?

 

[m0jjen]

@m0jjen Still looks like a fair amount of green growing in the tank, so at least there's that. Do you vacuum the gravel and "blast clean" off the rocks when you do water changes, BTW?

I do not blast the rocks, i do vaccum the top layer of sand tho.

 

[mcarroll]

I would start blast the rocks and I would get more intensive with the gravel vacuuming. Running a diatom or micron filter helps too.

Removing cells – whether living or dead – should be a major priority. Bacteria will keep the tank excessively nutrient limited as long as there's such a humongous carbon source in the tank to propel them.

 

[Rakie]

Just a quick update -- still completely dino free after metronidazole -- I know that's not the type of solution people are looking for in this thread.. but it did actually work for me, so I feel it's important to include the results. Even if I'm in the extreme minority here

 

[mcarroll]

@Rakie it's not a big deal aside from the lack of context. I totally believe you're telling the truth though....that's not the issue.

It's clear that more than metro was at work or the dino's would have returned.

Metro is not sufficient by itself – there are too many affirmative examples of this to discount.

 

[sfin52]

@Rakie don't tell amoo you are in this thread he might blame you for any issues with his green pasture.

Metro slowed them a little but the came right back. I didn't fix the underlying issues. Also the cysts arnt touched by metro. It also forces Dino to cyst form from what I read.

 

[m0jjen]

I would start blast the rocks and I would get more intensive with the gravel vacuuming. Running a diatom or micron filter helps too.

Removing cells – whether living or dead – should be a major priority. Bacteria will keep the tank excessively nutrient limited as long as there's such a humongous carbon source in the tank to propel them.

Ye will do that, battling AEFW aswell so just removed all my acros to a QT tank. Might aswell go ham on the display meanwhile

 

[Rakie]

Metro is not sufficient by itself – there are too many affirmative examples of this to discount.

Correct. I threw the sink at it, but that didn't stop it either -- Throwing metro + the sink at it did seem to work for me though!

 

[mcarroll]

Bacteria will keep the tank excessively nutrient limited as long as there's such a humongous carbon source in the tank to propel them.

...a humongous carbon source like all the dino theca that build up as they live, die and reproduce. 3000:1 carbon ratio.

 

[m0jjen]

I would start blast the rocks and I would get more intensive with the gravel vacuuming. Running a diatom or micron filter helps too.

Removing cells – whether living or dead – should be a major priority. Bacteria will keep the tank excessively nutrient limited as long as there's such a humongous carbon source in the tank to propel them.

Carbon source? Not sure im following

 

[mcarroll]

Sorry, referring back to prior comments in the thread....

Dino's we're dealing with are "armored"...they have a shell called a "theca" that's composed of an extremely high-carbon substance (cellulose I think?).

Bacteria are ordinarily carbon-limited in a healthy reef environment.

Once conditions switch and dino's go into "Mode Overkill" and start blooming, they have switched to heterotrophy....they're no longer depending on dissolved nutrients and sunshine, they're eating things....like bacteria. It's a huge food source, so they bloom like crazy. Lots of cells!

As cells divide and die off, the guts of the cell decompose rapidly under bacterial action.

But the skeleton (shell/theca) takes significantly more nutrients (particularly N and P) for bacteria to be able to fully break them down.

So the skeletons accumulate and accumulate, growing more and more bacteria, which put a more and more thorough drain on dissolved nutrients.

Fine for the heterotrophs that can eat stuff and have no dependency for dissolved nutrients...but your entire photosynthetic food chain suffers...and literally dies off. Trading the good guys for the bad.

All along the bad dino's are outcompeting all the other good heterotrophs either by sheer numbers or by toxin generation. They are capable of fairly complete decimation of the microbial food web. Beyond a certain point, it pretty much makes a recovery impossible without external inputs.

 

[Lowefx]

Sorry, referring back to prior comments in the thread....

Dino's we're dealing with are "armored"...they have a shell called a "theca" that's composed of an extremely high-carbon substance (cellulose I think?).

Bacteria are ordinarily carbon-limited in a healthy reef environment.

Once conditions switch and dino's go into "Mode Overkill" and start blooming, they have switched to heterotrophy....they're no longer depending on dissolved nutrients and sunshine, they're eating things....like bacteria. It's a huge food source, so they bloom like crazy. Lots of cells!

As cells divide and die off, the guts of the cell decompose rapidly under bacterial action.

But the skeleton (shell/theca) takes significantly more nutrients (particularly N and P) for bacteria to be able to fully break them down.

So the skeletons accumulate and accumulate, growing more and more bacteria, which put a more and more thorough drain on dissolved nutrients.

Fine for the heterotrophs that can eat stuff and have no dependency for dissolved nutrients...but your entire photosynthetic food chain suffers...and literally dies off. Trading the good guys for the bad.

All along the bad dino's are outcompeting all the other good heterotrophs either by sheer numbers or by toxin generation. They are capable of fairly complete decimation of the microbial food web. Beyond a certain point, it pretty much makes a recovery impossible without external inputs.

Very good information!!! Now what external inputs get rid of these jerks!

 

[taricha]

Excuse pulling several day old posts. Some great discussions wanted to respond to.

In my opinion the reset was detrimental because I had absolutely no biodiversity in the tank and Ostreopsis had free reign.

If we thoroughly sterilize some growth medium, and just let nature fill in the gaps, it usually isn't good things that take over. Which is why we basically never do that. We choose what we want to live there to keep out the "baddies"

I called into the lfs yesterday to buy something to dose phosphate. There was some shock and a chuckle as I explained what I was trying to do. The guys there are really knowledgable and very experienced. But they talked me out of dosing phosphate. I left with nothing, except recommendations. They recommended overfeeding to increase the phospates.
...
They have 2 or 3 phosphate chems for plants.

I wouldn't expect them to be specialists in every kind of tank problem.
Those "plant" solutions are great. I've even used high P liquid miracle grow - but I use less risky stuff now.
Trust us, many people overfed once they made the connection of Dinos to low nutrients, but overfeeding is inconsistent, slow to show benefits, immediate on the downsides, and lots of side-effects. Besides the inorganic nutrients we want to increase are very far downstream - several steps of processing - from the food we add.

I guess the link between low nutrients and Dinos is not widely known or understood...

That's been the trickiest piece to figure. And squaring our experience in reef tanks with what the published lit says about dinos in the wild.

...As I pulled corals from my main display, I did diluted peroxide dips 8:1 then 4:1 water:3% peroxide, followed by low salinity dips, 1.010 sg, then 1.008 then even straight DI water followed by 2 - 3 weeks in the QT tank. Even with all this I still ended up with amphidinium and recently found some ostreopsis from cysts that were brought over on the corals. Ostreopsis, Coolia and Prorocentrum were killed by the low salinity dips but not amphidinium or cysts of the others.
From my experience my recommendation would be if you want to do a full reset then completely start over and forget trying to save corals and inverts. There is also the possibility of bringing dinos on the fish from dinos on the slime coat. Freshwater dips and QT may be able to take care of that.

For disinfecting the system and ensuring cysts are killed; some testing was performed on ship ballast water. It took 1,000 ppm free chlorine residual for 24 hours to prevent any cysts from germinating. Hydrogen peroxide was also effective but at stronger doses leaving bleach as the best choice.

On a separate note, if a reset is the path that is decided, how do we then ensure dinos don't take over the system in the future? I bought a couple coral frags from a LFS (they were on consignment) and put them in QT. I collected some samples from the corals and put them under the scope and found Ostreopsis.
The best option seems to be the basis of this thread, establishing a healthy system with the biodiversity to handle the inadvertent introduction of dinos.

Just want to amen this. It's not just Beardo. Seen the same story through we investigated different details.
Large doses of peroxide, bleach not guaranteed to kill everything. Any other oxidizer target present in system reduces effect of h2o2. Sand, rock crevices and debris protect cells/cysts from chem exposure. Washed cysts in fresh water - and later they still germinated into happy, wiggling prorocentrum.
And even if somehow sterilization were achieved the chances of re-introduction seems so high. I've seen viable dinos in coral poop from guts of LPS. Scraping off rock at brand new LFS in town 2 kinds of dinos, and stringy diatoms that looked like dinos too. (So can be assumed the rest of their tanks will also eventually have dino cells present.) Plus all the areas that coral are imported from also have our problem strains of benthic dinos present on the reefs. If I had to run a system where I couldn't get anything that brought the chance of dino introduction, reefing would be so boring.

The closest I've seen to what we're doing outside of this thread is something casually referred to as "dirty method"...sorta what your LFS recommended. I don't think there really is such a think as "dirty method"...really just a name applied to laziness in most posts. I'm not sure there are any problems that can be solved just by overfeeding your tank.

Hey now! Dirty method allowed me to raise a mighty army of hundreds and hundreds of terrifying bristleworms.
But yeah, there was a "dirty method": dumping food in, no skimming, growing algae, stopping carbon dosing or other nutrient reduction methods.
and there was also a "clean method": UV, remove or daily vacuum sand, blast/capture/remove all debris, diatom filter, keep nutrients low.
Some people had measures of success. Looking back now, there were elements in each that offered some promise, but also things in each that worked against where the system needed to go.

 

[taricha]

Well hold on now. I did some reading on coolia and ostre. Seems if you add ammonia to a sample of this specie, they die. Could it be possible that feeding enough to spike ammonia? I'm being part cheeky and part serious lol I wouldnt want anyone to do that unless at their own risk.

I did this once. I added a drop of liquid miracle grow to a beaker of dinos and all the dinos were gone next day. Later realized I burned them with ammonia in the fertilizer. Unfortunately after I looked into it, the levels of ammonia needed to halt dinos (they encyst) is at or above levels harmful to fish etc.

Here we go again.

Another picture of the bronze small cells.

Ideas fellas?

[no motion] what so ever. All the cells are still and everything is connected by some mucus

I think it sounds like that weird tiny golden motionless mucous-y kind that does a good impression of symbiodinium. NCreefguy managed really good pics of them a while back.
compare pics here. See if you think it matches.
Does it get lighter/darker through the lighting cycle like other dinos?

It's clear that more than metro was at work or the dino's would have returned.

Metro is not sufficient by itself – there are too many affirmative examples of this to discount.

And plus I tested super high doses (like 10x recommended) of metro vs amphidinium and found that kind really didn't care at all.

 

[m0jjen]

I think it sounds like that weird tiny golden motionless mucous-y kind that does a good impression of symbiodinium. NCreefguy managed really good pics of them a while back.
compare pics here. See if you think it matches.
Does it get lighter/darker through the lighting cycle like other dinos?

They look the same If anything it gets abit darker, really unsure tho. Will observ today

 

[Tyson]

This is my first post on this thread, but want to give a big thanks to @mcarroll and @taricha. My tank is about 6 months old and had been battling dinos for about the last two. I fit right into the category of all dry rock and bottomed out nutrients, 0 N and 0 P. The tank is still pretty lightly stocked, and I've slowly had a ball of chaeto wither away over the past few months. I found this thread after I realized I had dinos (though haven't gotten them under a scope), tried a 3 day blackout to no avail, and was looking for anything natural that might work. Read through all this info twice in the beginning of October, and decided to start dosing N and P. I picked up a bottle of flourish phosphorus and mixed up a batch of spectracide stump remover. The first week of October I stuffed some filter floss in my baffles and started dosing to get P around .1ppm and N between 5-10ppm. I blasted dinos off my coral 1-2 times a day, changed floss every couple, and dosed daily. Haven't done a water change or scraped the glass in a month. I'd dose flourish every morning before I went to work and every evening keeping it right around .1ppm. 3 weeks later and I am stunned at the dinos disappearance. I was getting close to buying a cheap scope and possibly UV after a week or 2, but then I noticed them receding. Over the past week dinos have been 99% gone. I'm still dosing, but N has almost completely stabilized and dosing P has come down quite a bit. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures, but I had the stringy bubbly snot covering everything! Now my corals have never looked better! Thanks so much for all the work on this!! I know it's still early, but I finally feel excited about my tank again!

 

[mcarroll]

This is my first post on this thread, but want to give a big thanks to @mcarroll and @taricha. My tank is about 6 months old and had been battling dinos for about the last two. I fit right into the category of all dry rock and bottomed out nutrients, 0 N and 0 P.
[...]
Now my corals have never looked better! Thanks so much for all the work on this!! I know it's still early, but I finally feel excited about my tank again!

Thanks for posting!! Please keep us up to date!!

 

[mcarroll]

Need to filter some of the testimonials out of this thread and post on the main page.......need....more.....time.....!