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Unread 03/11/2016, 06:58 PM   #3288
34cygni
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Join Date: Mar 2013
Posts: 59
Quote:
Originally Posted by taricha
Hehe. This thread is so full of crazy.
That may be so, but we come by it honestly...


Quote:
01/06/2016, 08:16 AM #2547
Quiet_Ivy

Reefing is the definition of empirical science (We do stuff this way and it works but we don't really know why and can't prove it)
Implicit in that observation is the fact that along the way, we try doing a lot of stuff and it doesn't work. Hence karimwassef's rather trenchant sig, I would imagine, and hence a fair chunk of the crazy.


Quote:
Originally Posted by taricha
I've been thinking about what sort of things change between day 4 and day 10 of darkness. I'd expect die off of various things to significantly pick up making lots of nutrients available to bacteria etc.
And maybe it's not the issue that there's a different mechanism that takes effect between days 4 and 10. Maybe it's just the math of exponential growth: 2 to the 3rd is only 8, but 2 to the 10th power is 1024.
Yes, a blackout of any length is in essence beginning the change from a "sunlit" to a cryptic ecosystem, and then aborting the process. Heterotrophs rule in the darkness, and a new ecosystem emerges in which, lacking primary producers, the lowest trophic level consists of detrivorous bacteria and protists. Or at least, a new ecosystem begins to emerge... Obviously, the process won't get very far, but as you pointed out the shift would proceed pretty quickly on the micro level because there's lots of food around and microorganisms can reproduce like crazy when conditions are favorable.


Quote:
Originally Posted by taricha
Also, you mentioned a hypothetical benthic heterotrophic dino species. Do we know of any such species? I haven't run across one.
Well, I haven't put any time into investigating heterotrophic dinos for their own sake, but this popped when I Googled "benthic heterotrophic dinoflagellate": http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...26042000202154

This was also in the top 10 hits: http://www.phycologia.org/doi/abs/10...884-41-4-382.1

I've always assumed there's a diverse population of benthic heterotrophic dinos on wild reefs, some cross-section of which is present in any hobby system, in part because there are hundreds and hundreds of species of heterotrophic dinos so it seemed likely that some of them had adapted to the benthic environment, and in part because of stuff like this:


Quote:
08/21/2015, 02:40 AM #1570
34cygni

Quote:
Originally Posted by Molecular data and the evolutionary history of dinoflagellates
The importance of dinoflagellates in aquatic communities is hard to overestimate. They are ubiquitous in marine and freshwater environments, where they constitute a large percentage of both the phytoplankton and the microzooplankton, and in benthic communities as interstitial flora and fauna or as symbionts in reef-building corals, other invertebrates and unicellular organisms (Taylor, 1987).
Emphasis mine. Translated from Science, that means both mixotrophic ("flora") and heterotrophic ("fauna") dinos like to live in the little gaps between sand grains.
FWIW, such evidence as we have (which pertains to free swimming dinos) indicates that heterotrophic dinos and small ciliates are the least effective predators on mixotrophic dinos...


Quote:
Originally Posted by Growth, Feeding and Ecological Roles of the Mixotrophic and Heterotrophic Dinoflagellates in Marine Planktonic Food Webs
Therefore, in MIRs [Maximum Ingestion Rates] and MCRs [Maximum Clearance Rates] of the predators on MTDs [MixoTrophic Dinoflagellates], the general sequence was copepods > large ciliates = the larvae of benthos > small ciliates = HTDs [HeteroTrophic Dinoflagellates].
...so they're probably not the dominant predators in a blacked-out system. Though on the other hand, I expect heterotrophic dinos and small ciliates can bloom, too, meaning they could overwhelm a population of mixotrophic dinos with sheer numbers if given time.


Quote:
Originally Posted by taricha
The sandbed is ready to go in.
After I siphoned all visible dinos from my DT into the cultured sand, 24 hrs later there were about as many dinos inside the guts of other organisms as there were free swimming dinos. 48 hours, dinos were hard to find.
I'll try to get a microscope video of all the benthic heterotrophs among the sand grains in the cultured sand bed.

I'm not ready for the transplant yet, though. I'm trying to get an established culture of my dinos in a beaker before I wipe them out in my tank.
Are the dinos in your tank growing back quickly enough to keep up with demand? Bear in mind that the dino-killing organisms you've got need dinos to eat. Without food, their population may die back and your carefully cultivated sand could lose its punch.

--

Quote:
Originally Posted by sinful
So my plan of attack this round is going to be the UV, blackout and Dino X.
Part of the crazy around here is acknowledging that dinos are waaaay better at chemical warfare than we are, which means if you go that route, you may find that it actually turns 180 degrees on you and ends up helping the dinos.


Quote:
08/22/2015, 01:35 PM #1589
cal_stir

First let me say I used algaeX to try to rid my bubble algae, HUGE mistake, it TOTALLY DECIMATED my micro fauna and brought on my dinos.
As I understand it, AlgaeX and DinoX contain the same active ingredient, which would explain the similar results...


Quote:
Originally Posted by sinful
2. Dino X ( this worked incredibly well, completely rid my tank for a week, and then all hell broke loose and they came back stronger than ever) increasing dosage had no effect.
You're not the first to observe this -- at this point, DinoX may do nothing more than select for dinoflagellates that are immune to DinoX. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the widespread application of chemical fixes like DinoX over the years has had a role in selecting for particularly troublesome dinos like ostis, ultimately creating an even worse version of the problem they were meant to solve.

But all that having been said, the combination of UV + H2O2 was played with in 2013 and '14 and abandoned, perhaps because it wasn't yet apparent that when you knock your dinos back, you have to follow through to keep them down -- nobody has tried UV + DinoX that I'm aware of, so who knows? There may be a synergy there, too, and having already nuked your tank more than once, nuking it again probably won't make things worse. But the follow through may be a problem, what with the fallout and all... Meaning that I don't know how effective going dirty or dosing phyto would be with an algicidal chemical in the mix.


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