[34cygni]

Originally Posted by karimwassef

34cygni - yes. I've maintained my cryptic zone. It's so cryptic that a couple of fish have gotten in there and I have no way to get them out without tearing it apart.

They've lived there for 6 months now. Eating whatever pods they find, I assume.

LOL -- When you posted pics of your monster skimmer, I ended up counting the number of unions visible in the plumbing and thinking, "That's clearly the work of an experienced reefer." But sometimes life is learning the same lessons over and over again in different ways, and in this case it looks like that would be "always remember you will have to clean and fix whatever you make, so make it easy to take apart"...!

In any event, pods may not be the only things those fish are eating... Hungry fish is why sponges mostly live under reefs instead of on them, so could be there aren't any large sponges living in your cryptic zone. If so, you can't be getting much bang for your buck. Maybe if there were more filter feeders in your cryptic zone, you'd be seeing fewer in your DT -- sort of like an algae scrubber. But unlike an algae scrubber, a fully functioning cryptic biofilter doesn't allow you to feed more, it allows you to feed less...

It's counterintuitive, I know -- the obvious assumption is that more biofiltration capacity means the system can handle more food, and more food means faster growing, more colorful livestock. But the sponge loop means cryptic zones aren't just detritus dumps but in fact also operate as specialized recycling centers, and if you can successfully recycle more nutrients and organic carbon within the system, you don't need to put as much in to keep it going. It's an improvement in the system's overall efficiency, like tinkering with your car so it gets better gas mileage.

Pretty sure that's how this tank works, for example.

Is your cryptic zone still no-flow? Natural cryptic zones have some flow -- 2-4 cm/s is normal for the small, highly interconnected caves under the reef crest according to one paper -- and that Tank of the Month I linked to puts ~1500 G/hr through what looks like about a 30G cryptic sump (...my math says it's a bit shy of 35G, but it's a rimless tank and not full to the top).

Originally Posted by karimwassef

The acrylic front gets covered up with tiny featherdusters and coralline (that won't grow in my DT).

Originally Posted by 34cygni

As you might expect, the bacterial population of coralline is coral-friendly.

Since your cryptic zone is favoring coralline growth, if you decide to tinker with or rebuild it to retrieve your fish and see if you can get it to work better, you might try putting it downstream of your scrubber and macro to absorb some of the algal DOC and algae-friendly bacterioplankton before it gets to your DT. If coralline isn't growing in your DT, could be it's because the microbiome there is algae-dominant.

Originally Posted by karimwassef

I think a tank without some algae running somewhere (ATS, overflow, etc...) is not really healthy. I think the best path is to feed and evolve from diatoms to green hair to coralline... not to remove nutrients and devolve into dino death...

Getting to coralline, let alone keeping the darn stuff healthy over the long term, is the tricky bit. It's a shot in the dark, dare I say, but I'm hoping the sponge loop can help with that.

Originally Posted by karimwassef

Amazing how this hobby keeps me learning.

+1

BTW, was this...

Originally Posted by 34cygni

apparently dinos make a point of trying to lock up nitrogen

...what you were getting at when you were obsessing over nitrogen some weeks ago? I didn't want to make any assumptions, but I totally connected N with taricha's post about trace elements, and I wouldn't have been thinking about it if you hadn't been talking about it. At the time you were jumping up and down and pointing at the nitrogen cycle, though, I didn't see it.

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Originally Posted by Fish Keeper82

Its been kicked around in the local reef club of trying some technology used over seas using nano micro bubbles to produce a skimming effect in the tank.

Call me a scaredy-cat if you will, but to be frank, this idea sounds like something I wouldn't want to touch with a 10-foot pole -- if this went wrong and you aerosolized dino toxins, that would be Bad.

Removal processes that involve interacting with dinos, such as this, nvladik's plastic mesh...

Originally Posted by nvladik

Update on the crubber guys... deff still have dynos, but I don't see any on rock/coral, I know they are in the water. Every day when I take out the scrubber I can smell them within seconds.

...or for that matter even filter socks always make me nervous because some of the dinos in our tanks can make toxins that affect people.

Safety first!

Originally Posted by Pants

I didn't see much discussion here about the toxins produced by these guys and wanted to make sure everyone is taking proper precautions.

Ostreopsis sp. makes palytoxin. This is a toxin all reefers should be familiar with as palythoas and zoanthids produce this toxin and there are stories every year of hobbyists nearly killing themselves by mishandling these corals. Amphidinium isn't really thought of as highly toxic, but I've talked to too many reefers with Amphidinium blooms who have experienced personal health effects when killing these that I think we should treat Amphidinium with respect as well.

The dinos won't release the toxin until they die, so before starting any eradication procedures you should make sure the area around the tank is well ventilated, and have carbon ready to run. It would be a good idea to keep everyone (including other pets) away from the tank and wear gloves and a mask if you are getting a lot of dino die off.

Ecology and oceanography of harmful marine microalgae
https://www.terrapub.co.jp/e-library...ishida_023.pdf

FWIW, I like my North 7700.

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Originally Posted by taricha

B12 definitely increased photosynthetic output, and also seems to have juiced cell division somewhat.

I couldn't turn up any obvious link between vitamin B12 and photosynthesis, so I tried to find an indirect link. B12 was found to facilitate more efficient use of Fe, Zn, and Cu in a species of diatoms, so one possibility is that the uptick in activity you saw was fueled by better use of nutrients that the dinos already had on hand. But I figured if B12 substantially increased photosynthesis but only moderately increased reproduction, all that energy must be benefitting the dinos indirectly, as that would account for the manifest inefficiency of whatever was going on.

Poking around in Google Scholar turned up a link between the B12 economy and the Roseobacter bacteria clade, which you may recall from page 101. Turns out rosies are big into B12 synthesis. As of 2015, of the >50 rosies that have had their DNA sequenced, every single one had the genes for making B12. This makes sense given how tight rosies are with algae, and since rosies are involved, naturally that means organic sulfur is part of the B12 economy.

Since dinos kinda suck at absorbing nutrients from the water column and bacteria are notoriously good at that, your dinos may have pumped up their photosynthesis levels because most of the B12 you dosed was absorbed by bacteria, and the dinos needed the fixed carbon to make organic compounds so they could trade for it -- so rather than vitamin B12 increasing photosynthesis, I suspect increasing photosynthesis helped the dinos acquire B12. Or, being that they're dinos, maybe they were fattening up bacteria before eating them... Though on the other hand, heterotrophic dinos have been observed to snag plastids from their prey and keep them working for short periods of time, sometimes less than an hour, before digesting them; I hypothesized that they may need to photosynthesize for a little while to make organic carbon so they could make DMSP as a sink for sulfide, but maybe they're making organic sulfur to barter for B vitamins.

Have you tried Fe + B12 to see if that moves the needle on N or P? Colimitation by B12 and Fe has been observed in "high nitrate low chlorophyll" regions of the ocean. You might also try playing around with different combinations of B12, Fe, and Si to see if you can trigger diatom growth, as HNLC regions are typically low in dissolved Si, too.

I was going to suggest checking your dinos' response to B1 and B7, as well, since there's an outside chance that other, less toxic species of dinos are unable to compete because they're B1 and/or B7 auxotrophic -- it would be huge if you found a way to induce a population shift away from ostis in an infested tank by dosing B vitamins -- but it looks like I'm too late.

And by any chance, are you using OTC vitamin pills as a source for B12? I suggested this back on page 111...

Originally Posted by 34cygni

I expect a safer approach would be to take a water sample, or a sample of sand, or a sample of skimmate, give it a good long shake, pass the water through a 10uM filter sock, and see if you can culture bacteria from the filtered water with a source of cellulose. Those bacteria could then be tested on a jar of dinos and a sample of macro. They may not be effective by themselves, but a combination of TDA-making rosies and cellulose-eating bacteria that get along with each other might be what we're looking for (hence the suggestion to try culturing the latter from skimmate or live sand).

...because dinos make their armor out of cellulose -- and as it turns out, cellulose is commonly used in vitamins and other pills to fill out the bulk of each pill when the active ingredient is present only in small quantities. I can't help but wonder if your second B12 run demonstrated proof of concept.

Originally Posted by taricha

Fe showed greatest increase in dino numbers, clear response.

Are you using a chelated iron supplement? You might look into complexed iron (...chelation is technically a type of iron complex, I believe, but as I've said, chemistry is not my thing) as there may be other options that are more readily available to dinos -- I don't imagine anyone else would be interested in trying the relevant experiment on the off chance that it actually works, but if you give it a go, I'd be interested in the results.

I'm thinking that if there's an another form of iron supplement that your dinos clearly like more than chelated iron, maybe that should be dosed on a healthy reef to see if symbiodinium dinos like it, too.

Originally Posted by taricha

Which makes me think that they really just grab on to whatever isn't mucous protected (no sign on my softies) that sits in high flow, just like the netting used earlier by nvladik.

As a general rule, dinos do seem to like flow. I've read that scrubbers sometimes go through a dino phase before settling on green algae, which perhaps explains emerald crab's cautionary tale, and the phrase "oversized scrubber syndrome" was used by Floyd R Turbo on Santa Monica's web site to describe the tendency of scrubbers to grow dinos instead of green algae when their screens are too big -- I'd guess that the larger screen compensates for the dinos' comparatively poor ability to absorb N from the water.

Originally Posted by taricha

Whatcha think? Dinos or no. The color is pure rust brown.

There's been some question as to whether dinos are a problem outside of reef tanks... Sure would've been nice if they'd given you a sample to take home!

Originally Posted by taricha

It's always ostreopsis that comes out, virtually nothing else - pure ostis.

You might try adding a UV unit. If you knock back your ostis, maybe the amphidiniums that won't come out of the sand will pop up again.

02/22/2016, 03:00 AM #3173
34cygni

This fun science fact dropped into the mix about a week ago...

By killing dinos in the water column, UV would be a strong selection pressure favoring species that stay in the sand at night.

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Originally Posted by joti26

I am also getting far less of the greyish debris, just syphoned the rocks this evening into the eden 501 and having not cleaned it for four days amazed at how little was in there.

Do you get any aroma of sulfur when bringing this stuff up? From my own experience, I associate stinky grey vileness that nothing wants to eat with the anaerobic decay of uneaten food -- I think the worse the smell is, the more animal protein there is in the mix, but that's just a guess. If you're seeing less of this gunk without a change in your feeding routine, it's probably because your CUC is happier and healthier and has the support of a hungry population of microfauna.

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Originally Posted by Billybatz9

My biocube was torn down 4 days ago.

It has crossed my mind that AIO systems may be particularly prone to getting stuck in the dino-dominant ecological state, partly because mechanical filtration that doesn't trap dinos seems to work to their favor and partly because they have teeny-tiny fuges, which means there isn't a lot of heft behind the algal holobiont. The tank:sump ratio looks way too high, if it isn't actually a divide by zero error. But on the other hand, all-in-ones are so widely modded and added on to with HOB fuges or whatever that it's hard to make generalizations...

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Originally Posted by robertifly

What has seemed to make a real difference is blackout 4 days combined with a strong UV, with adding phytoplankton, more clean-up crew, pods and a ball of cheato in DT.

Thanks for your report. It's nice to hear this works with the clean method, too, in part because it looks like karimwassef was the first to suggest trying it...

08/17/2015, 08:39 PM #1549
karimwassef

Have you considered planting a large mass of chaeto or grape caulerpa?

Maybe get a green hair algae rock from a local reef keeper or store?

I think my chaeto and DSB refugium was a strong contributor to my health during the recovery.

There was some discussion of chaeto's possible anti-dino effects leading up to that post, but the idea didn't catch on -- perhaps not surprisingly...

08/17/2015, 09:45 PM #1551
Quiet_Ivy

I have a huge ball of chaeto taking over the right side of my tank. It's full of bristleworms! Ech.

In retrospect, chaeto growing in a tank that had been taken over by ostis looks significant, but at the time... Ech, indeed.

But for a rogue hobbyist going off the edge of the map and deciding to play around with light, rather than blackouts, that chaeto might be an ally in this fight would probably have been overlooked -- taricha FTW!

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Originally Posted by DNA

A few years back had a bucket full of sand that I sucked from the top layers and stored for a few months.
After I emptied it I noticed the insides of the bucket had gotten very heavily stained with red/orange.
I doubt it could have been just dinos so the iron from the GFO is the most likely source.

That reminded me of something that caught my eye when I first read through the thread last year...

02/17/2015, 11:45 AM #777
Budman422

This already has been a long battle. Almost 2 years I actually have had better results when I took off the gfo. I also quit wetskimming. Blackouts would work for a little while but they only come back stronger . I have a 20+ year old reef and believe at this point it is time to pull all the old sand. And add new. I think I will also try adding some new rock and trying to resead. I think it is a balance issue and it just isn't balanced. On the other hand I am getting growth on all my corals and have to frag all the time. I have a small biocube that I have stocked with frags from my tank and no dinos present.

IRON RELEASE BY GFO STIMULATES DINOS??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????

Obnoxious CAPS and ????s were me making a note to myself, not part of Budman422's post.