Reef and Dive
Valuable Member
Let me introduce myself, my name is Paulo Scaldaferri, a Brazilian reefer who have been dealing with dinos as a special area of interest: I had it on my own tanks many times before and sometimes for months.
This led me to an avid interest of study of those alveolates, including reading many scientific articles and the famous R2R topic (“are you tired of battling dinos altogether”) with hundreds of pages, among others. I often chime in to help people whenever I can. Here in Brazil other reefers often send me samples of their “dinos” for microscopic analysis (and no, I do now work with this - I’m a doctor).
Over the years, this gave me a reasonable idea of the nature of the bad dinoflagellates.
I’m aware dino blooms occur in nature in situations of eutrophication. Many articles show this. I’m also aware that a high N-P stoichiometric relation is pretty consistent with dinoflagellates replication in many articles. Because of this I usually advise against the so-called good ratios while battling dinos because they replicate much faster than other microrganisms in this case, and this worsens the problem.
Other things have been shown to accelerate their growth in articles and for this reason I don’t ever advise it, like iron dosing. Allelopathy by diatoms inhibits their growth, so while battling dinos is not the best time to be so 0 RODI crazy. Silica dosing eventually helps to reduce some dinos.
That said, there is a great questioning of some of those scientific concepts among us reefers: very frequently, repeated experiences have shown that zero nutrients longterm actually leads to dinos, specially on new tanks. I believe the main reason for that, and what differs from studies in nature from tanks, is that we have been starting out tanks too sterile these days.
This just shifts the chances of survival for the few microrganisms that happen to do well in this conditions (I don’t mean that they prefer). Once they start thriving it gets hard for other organisms to thrive because of their toxins like ovatoxin and mascarenotoxin (they can also kill pretators such as hermits and even copepods).
These days I think it is really not that hard to deal with dinos once we use a microscope and detect their genus.
Ostreopsidaceae (Ostreopsis sp, Coolia sp) are pretty toxic and they were a big trouble in the past. Although they are classified as benthic species, they like pretty well to occupy the water column and these days are very easily controlled by a good UV (1 w/3 gal or 1 w/10L) with flow slow enough for parasites (being faster to solve when UV is used on the display and not on the sump).
Other genus are harder to deal but far from impossible, like Amphidinium (large and small cell), Prorocentrum, Gymnodinium etc.
Over time it got me some confidence to deal with them so I even “created the conditions” and “solved it in days” in my own display just to demonstrate it on video: it is in my YT channel as a video to show Cruz Arias - Elegant Corals for people in Brazil.
I’m not saying at all that Cruz protocol is perfect, but it shows pretty well some of the best methods to deal with dinos: saprophitic bacteria dosing together with carbon (not carbon alone once dinos take advantage); and mechanical removal by micro-bubbling, and frequent rock blasting for dinos and detritus.
Even a huge UV is not enough for these dinoflagellates.
A blackout reduces most dinos for some days but is rarelly a longterm solution.
Peroxide dosing and medications alone do not solve it, and sometimes are too harsh for corals. Often cyano also appears to say hello, azythromicin deals with cyano but worsens dinos. On the other hand, I have to admit that, when a lot of green algae come together with dinos, dosing fluconazole pretty frequently helps to start to solve both.
Phyto and copepod dosing looks initially like a good idea, but it has been tried many times, and even in high amounts usually do not solve the problem (and phyto species have not shown the same alellophatic effects as diatoms).
Temperature raising, sorry, but it is just another myth, it only shifts the entire tank balance for a while and is near ever a solution.
Raising the pH longterm is usually a good thing since most dinos thrive with 7.8 to 8. There are species that like higher pH (like Alexandrium catenella) but I never found this guy on a tank microscopic analysis.
All that said, taking longterm care of this shifts helps a lot to control dinos.
But is very important to do some observations that usually people who fail do not take into consideration: from many many microscopic analyses that I’ve done I have never found a sample where I did not find at least one dino. From the microscopic point of view they are nearly ubiquitous. So many people just get crazy about small dinos patches and actually harm the tank and corals a lot more trying to solve it. It is impossible, IMHO, to totally avoid dinos entrance into the tank by any means.
Often people also misidentify something as a dinoflagellate problem: brown things with bubbles are very frequently other things. Sometimes very strong lights often make corals expel simbionts that look a lot like dinos (the are in fact dinoflagellates, but Symbiodinium that develop flagella while leaving the corals). These specific ones are not the bad dinos and no, they do not transform themselves into other dino species.
I hope this explanation helps people with this casual problem that is far from impossible to solve.
This led me to an avid interest of study of those alveolates, including reading many scientific articles and the famous R2R topic (“are you tired of battling dinos altogether”) with hundreds of pages, among others. I often chime in to help people whenever I can. Here in Brazil other reefers often send me samples of their “dinos” for microscopic analysis (and no, I do now work with this - I’m a doctor).
Over the years, this gave me a reasonable idea of the nature of the bad dinoflagellates.
I’m aware dino blooms occur in nature in situations of eutrophication. Many articles show this. I’m also aware that a high N-P stoichiometric relation is pretty consistent with dinoflagellates replication in many articles. Because of this I usually advise against the so-called good ratios while battling dinos because they replicate much faster than other microrganisms in this case, and this worsens the problem.
Other things have been shown to accelerate their growth in articles and for this reason I don’t ever advise it, like iron dosing. Allelopathy by diatoms inhibits their growth, so while battling dinos is not the best time to be so 0 RODI crazy. Silica dosing eventually helps to reduce some dinos.
That said, there is a great questioning of some of those scientific concepts among us reefers: very frequently, repeated experiences have shown that zero nutrients longterm actually leads to dinos, specially on new tanks. I believe the main reason for that, and what differs from studies in nature from tanks, is that we have been starting out tanks too sterile these days.
This just shifts the chances of survival for the few microrganisms that happen to do well in this conditions (I don’t mean that they prefer). Once they start thriving it gets hard for other organisms to thrive because of their toxins like ovatoxin and mascarenotoxin (they can also kill pretators such as hermits and even copepods).
These days I think it is really not that hard to deal with dinos once we use a microscope and detect their genus.
Ostreopsidaceae (Ostreopsis sp, Coolia sp) are pretty toxic and they were a big trouble in the past. Although they are classified as benthic species, they like pretty well to occupy the water column and these days are very easily controlled by a good UV (1 w/3 gal or 1 w/10L) with flow slow enough for parasites (being faster to solve when UV is used on the display and not on the sump).
Other genus are harder to deal but far from impossible, like Amphidinium (large and small cell), Prorocentrum, Gymnodinium etc.
Over time it got me some confidence to deal with them so I even “created the conditions” and “solved it in days” in my own display just to demonstrate it on video: it is in my YT channel as a video to show Cruz Arias - Elegant Corals for people in Brazil.
I’m not saying at all that Cruz protocol is perfect, but it shows pretty well some of the best methods to deal with dinos: saprophitic bacteria dosing together with carbon (not carbon alone once dinos take advantage); and mechanical removal by micro-bubbling, and frequent rock blasting for dinos and detritus.
Even a huge UV is not enough for these dinoflagellates.
A blackout reduces most dinos for some days but is rarelly a longterm solution.
Peroxide dosing and medications alone do not solve it, and sometimes are too harsh for corals. Often cyano also appears to say hello, azythromicin deals with cyano but worsens dinos. On the other hand, I have to admit that, when a lot of green algae come together with dinos, dosing fluconazole pretty frequently helps to start to solve both.
Phyto and copepod dosing looks initially like a good idea, but it has been tried many times, and even in high amounts usually do not solve the problem (and phyto species have not shown the same alellophatic effects as diatoms).
Temperature raising, sorry, but it is just another myth, it only shifts the entire tank balance for a while and is near ever a solution.
Raising the pH longterm is usually a good thing since most dinos thrive with 7.8 to 8. There are species that like higher pH (like Alexandrium catenella) but I never found this guy on a tank microscopic analysis.
All that said, taking longterm care of this shifts helps a lot to control dinos.
But is very important to do some observations that usually people who fail do not take into consideration: from many many microscopic analyses that I’ve done I have never found a sample where I did not find at least one dino. From the microscopic point of view they are nearly ubiquitous. So many people just get crazy about small dinos patches and actually harm the tank and corals a lot more trying to solve it. It is impossible, IMHO, to totally avoid dinos entrance into the tank by any means.
Often people also misidentify something as a dinoflagellate problem: brown things with bubbles are very frequently other things. Sometimes very strong lights often make corals expel simbionts that look a lot like dinos (the are in fact dinoflagellates, but Symbiodinium that develop flagella while leaving the corals). These specific ones are not the bad dinos and no, they do not transform themselves into other dino species.
I hope this explanation helps people with this casual problem that is far from impossible to solve.
