Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?
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This post got long. lots of interesting stuff here.
Please do ID, assume nothing until you see it under the scope.
I'd love to give a blanket thumbs up on Seachem Flourish Nitrogen, and I should have caught this before, but I just looked it up and it's half potassium nitrate (great), and half Urea. Urea after it goes to ammonium is great for plants and green algae, but unfortunately Dinos have been shown to be really good at direct urea uptake, so we need to consider Seachem Flourish Nitrogen as a nitrogen source to avoid. (If any want to dig in on details of where this idea of preferred forms of N & P comes from see post #159)
Best stick to Nitrate that green algae is good at uptaking, and that dinos are bad at.
for me, 4grams of KNO3 (spectracide stump removed) into my 70 gallons water gives a 10ppm NO3 boost. Lots of helpful people in this thread can calc a dose for your system, or point you to a calculator.
If you have a significant bloom of one of the common species that goes into the water, it may clog a 10 micron sock fairly fast, so yes it works if you can keep up with the emptying.
Dino toxins and associated biotoxins can bother any and everything. Run GAC when any signs of toxins.
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The best pics of these I've seen are from NCreefguy.
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Crap I'll stop Seachem nitrogen! Just did a quick search for spectracide stump remover and it's kinda hard to get in Canada (we ban all the good stuff! Like Bayer and weed killer) and may have found a source.
Now to find a place that sells 10 micron socks in Canada too. Reefing is tough up here! Lol
I'll do the ID when i can, and will change out the carbon sooner.
Thanks so much!!!!
Beardo
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You can also look for food grade or reagent grade sodium nitrate.
As far as filter socks, look outside the aquarium industry. I purchased 1 micron polyester felt filter socks from a biodiesel supply house.
A quick Google search found this place in Canada that may be an option.
http://www.clearstream.ca/filterbag.htm
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mcarroll
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I can't speak to their reasoning one way or another cuz I don't know it.
But I can say that one of the things a skimmer is most effective at is aeration. Aeration is linked to pH. And some dino's have been thought to respond "favorably" to certain pH swings or pH levels. We've never seen a documented case where pH seemed to have a role...but most folks have no desire to mess with their tank's pH, so you don't find many folks experimenting along these lines.
I can also say that we've now documented an awful lot of cases that cleared up while the skimmer was running, so I couldn't say that turning it off would be very necessary, even if it did help in some way.
If you haven't read through the first post and the materials linked up there, now would be the time.
Were you dosing vodka, vinegar, bio-pellets, etc? Or using extra bio-media of any kind?
How is your UV plumbed and have you ever measured or closely estimated the actual flow going through it? What make/model of UV is is?
Low nutrient levels are not usually the sole problem .....usually there has to be a combination of things....like new tank + dry rock + carbon dosing + GFO.......usually seems to take two or more.
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mcarroll
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Correcting tank conditions, removing disturbances and beefing up the cleanup crew usually will do it. Some physical removal by hand with scrubbing and siphoning is usually necessary as well, especially if it's blooming near corals. (I had to toothbrush my Hydnophora at least once a day and I still lost 90% of the colony to encroaching chrysophytes.)
They don't seem to have anything like the effect dino's have on phosphate consumption however, so nutrient corrections are usually very minor.
They can also be toxic, so I'd recommend the same activated carbon treatment while they're blooming.
To anyone interested – check out @reeferfoxx's posts on the topic as well......many of which you'll see under the #chrysophyte tag if you click it.
What about the flow in the UV filter? must be slow or fast? I am planning to add an Ozone as well only when I am darkening out (only 3-7 days).
let's suppose that I can dark out for a longer period of time. Let us say, 7 days. does this help more? I have another 2 quarantine tanks. if I put there the corals, raise po4/no3 and I turn on the Ozone and UV, will this kill them completely? or they have another way to servive? I read that they can find a way to survive and that they are very adaptive. Have anyone of you tried the blue spectrum therapy? Like using a very blue spectrum. does this help? I guess that yes. If darkening out for 3 days affect them, then something in the spectrum must also affect them as they are depending on the light. Let's take WorldWideCorals for example, they use a very blue light. Has anyone heard that WWC have Dinos? I will try all blue to see what happens. Also, in Germany many have luck with Zeozym with some detritus eating bacteria, anyone tried it?
let's suppose that I can dark out for a longer period of time. Let us say, 7 days. does this help more? I have another 2 quarantine tanks. if I put there the corals, raise po4/no3 and I turn on the Ozone and UV, will this kill them completely? or they have another way to servive? I read that they can find a way to survive and that they are very adaptive. Have anyone of you tried the blue spectrum therapy? Like using a very blue spectrum. does this help? I guess that yes. If darkening out for 3 days affect them, then something in the spectrum must also affect them as they are depending on the light. Let's take WorldWideCorals for example, they use a very blue light. Has anyone heard that WWC have Dinos? I will try all blue to see what happens. Also, in Germany many have luck with Zeozym with some detritus eating bacteria, anyone tried it?
Blackouts won't harm them. They will tolerate it and continue as is. A blackout though can be useful for two things.
1) get them in to water column for a greater period of time. Which will assist the UV.
2) to give corals a bit of respite if being badly affected.
What indent suggest you do is keep doing blackouts as this will add stresses.
Some people have claimed irradication of dino's with blackouts. However as we don't know what else those were running and if indeed were even dinos to begin with it's simply unlikely to have been light.
I think taricha did tests on blackouts a while back.
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hmm... I need to walk this back a bit for now.
Others have used Flourish Nitrogen and it not been disastrous, rather it has been helpful. Of the two people I've seen in the thread say they used it, both chefjpaul and jolt specifically said they used Flourish Nitrogen as their source in this thread and posted that it was successful.
My revised thought would be Seachem Flourish Nitrogen is an acceptable source for N dosing, however, I do still feel like it's not the best source and NO3 should be preferred, for now.
Based on above, and convo with @mcarroll I'd revise to say keep using it until you get a better NO3 source.
I also bought Sodium Nitrate from amazon and it seems fine. think Beardo mentioned that possibility.
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There is an easy way of getting rid of chrysophytes. The result is zero chrysophytes but a big cyano bloom. However, the cyano didn't last forever.
This post got long. lots of interesting stuff here.
Please do ID, assume nothing until you see it under the scope.
I'd love to give a blanket thumbs up on Seachem Flourish Nitrogen, and I should have caught this before, but I just looked it up and it's half potassium nitrate (great), and half Urea. Urea after it goes to ammonium is great for plants and green algae, but unfortunately Dinos have been shown to be really good at direct urea uptake, so we need to consider Seachem Flourish Nitrogen as a nitrogen source to avoid. (If any want to dig in on details of where this idea of preferred forms of N & P comes from see post #159)
Best stick to Nitrate that green algae is good at uptaking, and that dinos are bad at.
for me, 4grams of KNO3 (spectracide stump removed) into my 70 gallons water gives a 10ppm NO3 boost. Lots of helpful people in this thread can calc a dose for your system, or point you to a calculator.
If you have a significant bloom of one of the common species that goes into the water, it may clog a 10 micron sock fairly fast, so yes it works if you can keep up with the emptying.
Dino toxins and associated biotoxins can bother any and everything. Run GAC when any signs of toxins.
The continued rise (aside from invisible dieoff which is always possible) is because we can only test for inorganic P & N. So organic forms are undetectable, and as they are slowly being broken down biologically into inorganic PO4 and NO3, they then show up in the test.
Lots of people fret about high P hurting sps, see my last post #2078 for why that's misguided. Acro growth was fastest at high levels we aren't recommending anyone shoot for - PO4 0.50 (but with lower calcification as expected), speculating here - it seems much more likely that what's hurting the corals is undetectable harmful large organic molecules synthesized by aquarium habitants - Dinos are prime suspect - but examples of these are too numerous to name.
I'd say you have a limiting factor since elevated P and N shows no algae growth - I vote for water changes, and then yes - it takes time.
Best description of ostreopsis motion!
This and others similar accounts - I had 3 kinds at once in my first outbreak - are the strongest evidence that encountering dino cells is not Rare in the hobby. If a single bad strain was rare, then the odds of multiples would be amazingly low, yet it's pretty common.
WOW. Amazing post.
First: most dino toxins are neurotoxins. Breathing difficulties, lightheadedness and nausea are among the reported symptoms. don't treat it lightly - I've also seen discussion of associated mental health affects with more severe cases of some of these toxins.
Do you notice a strong smell? Others have reported a "dino smell"
without risking any further exposure, do you think that you can say whether the problematic toxin is concentrated to the areas with these tiny golden guys, or more generally within the system? Because Ostreopsis are known to be toxic. The tiny ones no one knows much about.
I'll look through some stuff and try to collect a few reports together to make a separate post just on these tiny guys.
The best pics of these I've seen are from NCreefguy.
I've tentatively been calling these symbiodinium-like, because of their similarity to zooxanthellae, but the more I look at these and actual zooxanthellae, the less I like that ID.
I'm leaning more towards chrysophytes these days.
@mcarroll have you seen anything about chrysophyte accounts and treatment to suggest we should handle these differently from dinos?
Great Info and I appreciate the help with ID. I took some new scope pics just now to try and show how they compare in size to the Ostreopsis. I am going to crank up the UV this week and I am pretty sure the O's will disappear, but these new smaller ones we are discussing have formed a 1/8-1/4' slime on frag racks, tiles, and frag plugs. There are certainly hot spots in our grow out system where they are thicker than others. I'll try to note distinct areas too light/flow/s
To answer your questions:
When I suck them out, I use a little apparatus that allows me to siphon into a bucket where I cut the lid out to fit a mesh sock that is within a felt sock. Then once the water passes through that, I have a maxijet that dumps it back into the sump. Think of this as my little reef Dyson if you will. So that sock gets all sorts of full of this new small dinos as in 2-4 cups worth after my weekly siphon. As I walk the 3 socks over to the laundry where I do them in a load with bleach, the smell is almost an organic chlorine type of smell and that is what makes me a bit woosy. I will use a respirator from now on to be more careful as I know these things are nothing to mess with.
See what you think of the new pics where I tried to get an Ostreopsis in focus WITH these new tiny guys. I did that at 40x, 100, then I tried 400x, but its a bit blurry. Thank you
Hi, I decided to go with Ozone as I have one on hands. I installed it yesterday and today I see many strings un attached and in the water column, I never saw them do this. They are definitely dying. it was just one day and there are less strings. They are floating all over the water column. it was just a little Ozone ORP between 360-375. I did not even start the blackout. Ozone seems to be doing something. I will raise it to 400-420 ORP and see what happens. I am really impressed. Strings are everywhere in the water and are attaching to corals. I will blackout to take them off and use a filter sock.
Has anyone tried Ozone before?
Has anyone tried Ozone before?
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Ozone is a sterilizer much like a UV sterilizer but can be more difficult to understand or have the space, orp controller, or don't want to risk any harm to live stock. Too much ozone can wipe out a tank.
I think you are seeing the benefits of ozone, but don't use too much for a fast cure all. Take it slow.
I have an Apex 2016 connected to control Ozone. I am using an aqua medic 300 rated for 3000-litre tanks. I am dosing only 50 O3 mg/h to each pump (total 100 O3 mg/h) and not the full power of the Ozone reactor (300 O3 mg/h my). Also, just started now a blackout to help a little.
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It is good you are asking. I've heard of many people using ozone. Though, I want to side with Randy, that it may kill other organisms including dino. You can't tell an oxidizer to pick one from the other.
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