Dinoflagellates - dinos a possible cure!? Follow along and see!

[reddog]

I'm still battling it as well. I have Amphidinium and Ostreopsis. The Amphidinium are the dominate dino since I somehow took out most of the Ostreopsis. I have now removed 80% of my sand. I will remove another 10% next week and then the remaining 10% the week after that. I am dosing Dino X every 2 days as directed, from a dosing pump. The dino looks to be receding some, although since I am removing the sand, I might just not see it as much. After this is over, I will do a water change and see what happens. If I was not successful, I will give the Dino X one more go. I have a 125 set up in the dining room that will be a fish holding tank while I test other options. I am considering doing bleach again, once the tank is fish free. At this point, I don't really care if it nukes the tank. I just want my fish safe. I feel like I can kill them with bleach, it's just a matter of finding the right concentration and duration of treatment. I just got a used Marineland 300DD tank/stand/sump yesterday. I am going to use new sand and acid wash/bleach all old rock/new rock for the new build. The only thing that I will transfer over are a few corals and the fish. This will only be done after a QT period/freshwater dips for all animals (except inverts, they will just have to live in a dark tank for a while). God knows I don't want this crap to come back! It's going to be a lengthy process, but hopefully it will end up ok. My no3 is 50+ from the bleach/antibiotic treatments I have done and my po4 is 0.13 at the moment. Dirty method doesn't work for me.

 

[reddog]

[edit] Posted twice on accident and I can't figure out how to delete it.. lol

 

[Jolanta]

the bleach doesn't 100% fix it, but it does get it down to a manageable level where you can start introducing controlled amount of nitrates and phosphates. Im running fallow so its not an issue with fish, but if you have another tank you could easily start that up and transfer them into that one.

I would like something to kill dinos 100% couse only to control them I can do it with diatom filter but even there are only small patches of dinos in the tank my corals are dying, if they would be ok I wouldnt mind to have dinos cooexisting. My nutrients are already high and stable but it seems it dont do nothing to my dinos. I would like to listen some who had ostreopsis and did menage to combat then with out tiring they tanks down .

 

[Lowefx]

BLEACH KILLS FISH!!! unless you use .2ml per 10 gal or something like that. A few hundred pages back there is a formlua for using bleach, but you CANNOT use it freely.

 

[reddog]

BLEACH KILLS FISH!!! unless you use .2ml per 10 gal or something like that. A few hundred pages back there is a formlua for using bleach, but you CANNOT use it freely.

I killed two fish with bleach.

 

[reddog]

I would like something to kill dinos 100% couse only to control them I can do it with diatom filter but even there are only small patches of dinos in the tank my corals are dying, if they would be ok I wouldnt mind to have dinos cooexisting. My nutrients are already high and stable but it seems it dont do nothing to my dinos. I would like to listen some who had ostreopsis and did menage to combat then with out tiring they tanks down .

I would advise you setting up a holding tank to move your fish to. Put some rock in it, a few sponge filters, pvc, and dump some bacteria in it. Once it's ready for the fish, do a freshwater dip on each fish and move them over. That's what I am going to do in the next month or so. I'm going to leave the corals in the system without the fish so I can do the bleach treatments again.

 

[Jolanta]

Im sorry guys but I give up, this weekend my friend will come to take my corals and fish to take care of them and I will restart my tank, I think I will drain the water and use freshwater with bleach for few weeks and then fill it with new saltwater and cicle with good bacteria and hopefully one day I can have my fish back in the tank. I will visit you here learning and sending good vibes hoping maybe one day we will know whats the cause of dinos and how to kill them, especialy o. Ovata.

 

[K. Steven]

Do we know if copepods/amphipods are able to consume Ostreopsis? I'm not sure if it's been mentioned yet.

 

[Jolanta]

Do we know if copepods/amphipods are able to consume Ostreopsis? I'm not sure if it's been mentioned yet.

Thats how my tank looked at night before ostreopsis got into my system.

Dinos killed them all

 

[ajm83]

Im sorry guys but I give up, this weekend my friend will come to take my corals and fish to take care of them and I will restart my tank, I think I will drain the water and use freshwater with bleach for few weeks and then fill it with new saltwater and cicle with good bacteria and hopefully one day I can have my fish back in the tank. I will visit you here learning and sending good vibes hoping maybe one day we will know whats the cause of dinos and how to kill them, especialy o. Ovata.

Sorry to hear that, I've been following your progress for a while. I thought the diatom filter was going to win the battle.

Good luck with the restart.

 

[mcarroll]

have you tried adding rock/sand/crap from other peoples tank?

@Jolanta what about this? It was hinted at earlier.

Your tank has unfortunately been starved for so long and then "nuked" so many times that it might not be able to self-balance under the current circumstances. Or it might take a long ugly period to get there.

Bacteria in a bottle might help too, but that's a more limited solution.

We want everything from viruses to copepods, etc.

Are your lights dimmable, BTW?

 

[mandrieu]

I thought the diatom filter was going to win the battle

Just another myth. It will filter whatever is in the water column but can't do much for dinos in the substrate, rocks or glass.

 

[Jolanta]

Sorry to hear that, I've been following your progress for a while. I thought the diatom filter was going to win the battle.

Good luck with the restart.

I really was hoping for the diatom filter too and I think it can help a lot to control them but my dinos grow so fast that I leave my tank spotless and the other day I see dinos everywere once again and I think its a loosing battle [emoji22]

 

[taricha]

Couple of experimental things to just add to knowledge floating around.
(TLDR: metro really ineffective on amphidinium, extended darkness very effective on the less common small cell amphidinium.)
I cultured up a nice mix of the two amphidinium species, common large cell that lots of people deal with that never leaves sand, and the less common small cell type that a few have had.
Experiment 1 - heavy metronidazole doses (4x recommended for 6 days- two rounds), of interest because amphidinium is not known to form cysts.
No dino deaths. The metro worked as expected, attacking the DNA in the chloroplasts, causing a "blobby" look as chloroplasts were damaged

This progressed to some cells losing all pigmentation, having no functioning chloroplasts

Surprisingly, the cells did not care that they had no chloroplasts, still just as active, and no reduction in population of either species of amphidinium at all.

Experiment 2 - extended darkness (pulled out of darkness on 8th day), of interest because in scientific lit amphidinium carterae - which looks like our small cell amphidinium - has a self destruct sequence that is triggered by extended darkness and no cells reported to survive past 8 days of darkness.
Result, large cell amphidinium was just fine, no decrease of population, no reduction in activity. All traces of small cell amphidinium were completely gone, except for a couple of dead lysed cells.
(Even knowing this, I'd still use UV which has been shown to be effective vs small cell amphidinium, instead of subjecting corals to 8 days of darkness. UV does nothing to large cell amphidinium.)

All together, these tests make a good case to me that common large cell amphidinium is perfectly happy consuming nutrients from sources other than photosynthesis (it eats stuff, likely bacteria).

 

[Jolanta]

@Jolanta what about this? It was hinted at earlier.

Your tank has unfortunately been starved for so long and then "nuked" so many times that it might not be able to self-balance under the current circumstances. Or it might take a long ugly period to get there.

Bacteria in a bottle might help too, but that's a more limited solution.

We want everything from viruses to copepods, etc.

Are your lights dimmable, BTW?

Hi Mcarroll I did add some rock from my friends healthy system some time ago in hope to get some microfauna to kill my dinos but it was covered with dinos in about two days I do dose Microbacter7 for about a week now but it seems to make my dinos worst. My light is ATI sunpower and I only can use two t5s being the lowest light I can get from it. I think my tank is at the point it would take a lot months more to maybe control ostreopsis but I feel like its taking joy from my life and Im tired of it, I lost much time and money to combat them and I think its not worth it anymore. Im also afraid of my family health becouse of the kind of dinos I have, so I think Im making a good decision.

 

[mandrieu]

Couple of experimental things to just add to knowledge floating around.
(TLDR: metro really ineffective on amphidinium, extended darkness very effective on the less common small cell amphidinium.)
I cultured up a nice mix of the two amphidinium species, common large cell that lots of people deal with that never leaves sand, and the less common small cell type that a few have had.
Experiment 1 - heavy metronidazole doses (4x recommended for 6 days- two rounds), of interest because amphidinium is not known to form cysts.
No dino deaths. The metro worked as expected, attacking the DNA in the chloroplasts, causing a "blobby" look as chloroplasts were damaged

This progressed to some cells losing all pigmentation, having no functioning chloroplasts

Surprisingly, the cells did not care that they had no chloroplasts, still just as active, and no reduction in population of either species of amphidinium at all.

Experiment 2 - extended darkness (pulled out of darkness on 8th day), of interest because in scientific lit amphidinium carterae - which looks like our small cell amphidinium - has a self destruct sequence that is triggered by extended darkness and no cells reported to survive past 8 days of darkness.
Result, large cell amphidinium was just fine, no decrease of population, no reduction in activity. All traces of small cell amphidinium were completely gone, except for a couple of dead lysed cells.
(Even knowing this, I'd still use UV which has been shown to be effective vs small cell amphidinium, instead of subjecting corals to 8 days of darkness. UV does nothing to large cell amphidinium.)

All together, these tests make a good case to me that common large cell amphidinium is perfectly happy consuming nutrients from sources other than photosynthesis (it eats stuff, likely bacteria).

Very interesting info. After my many failures dealing with them (not much different than @Jolanta) I think that until there is some form of "medication" that hurts them and leaves most other things alone we can only try to control them to some extent.

 

[rog2961]

since switching back to bleach everything is alot better. Last time I only did it for 3 days followed up with just nitrate for the next week. This didn't work out at all, dinos got way worse. Going to continue for two weeks or so before I stop. I can see the coralline grow more everyday with bleach. Without it growth is quite slow.

 

[Thor2j]

I was at one of the larger coral stores in Orlando today, no not the really good one, and half there frags are covered in dinos. I cant believe they are selling them like that.

 

[becks]

Just an update on my situation; I still can't see any dinos in my tank and after my waterchange yesterday they still did not appear when previously their population would have exploded in numbers within hours.

I'm also happy to see small sections of GHA

 

[rog2961]

nice, I tried raising nitrates and it didnt work for me, Didnt raise phosphates thought so that may have been it