Quote:
Originally Posted by Kurt03
Youtube is still rendering the video but heres the link, it should be done soon.
https://youtu.be/ihIS2oTi6kc
Its kinda long but figured I would leave the whole video there and you can skip around as you wish. There is some good video around 5:30 at higher magnification. The moving object has some sort of moving tentacles/whiskers on its face(if its called a face!) |
I had a tough time looking for a class of ciliates that could match it. It's not something I've seen in my tank. If I had to guess, (and I do, cause I have no idea) I would say it's a trocophore of some sort. That's not an ID, that's a larval stage of many kinds of worms, mollusks, echinoderms etc that has ciliated head region and can have a locomotive foot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kurt03
Wonder if anyone has noticed an increase in no3 or po4 when the Dino's disappear?
It looks like mine are in a decline since I've been overfeeding and dosing po4. Has anyone else dosed po4 and noticed this? I'm closely testing po4 to make sure I don't add to much, but I'm adding .016 - .03 every few days on top of dosing oyster feast, flake food several times a day, reef chili, and whatever else I feel like. I still test below .02 on red sea and .003 on hanna ulr. Not sure which to believe but the same end result, it's pretty low! Something's eating all those nutrients, hopefully it's mostly good stuff  |
In my experience, I had to add a pretty substantial amount of N and P to keep them both elevated to the levels I wanted.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fish Keeper82
Initially all samples I viewed were Ostreopsis on rock and sand they were stringy and produced bubbles. Bothered the heck out of corals since they made the polyps close up.After UV for some reason It got rid of them easily( I know that was not your experiance with UV).
That left Amphidinium to grow and produce a heavy mat but no string or bubbles. It grew all over the sand bed but virtually none on the rocks at all. These did not bother corals at all.
...I was very surprised to find all Amphidinium under the scope from then on.
I still belive these guys had something to do with it. Although I never saw them actually eat Dinos they did multiply in my tank and would see one with the naked eye from time to time in the water column and in my filter socks when changing them. Biggest I saw was 3/4" or so:
In hindsight I believe I had Osteopsis and Amphidinium since the beggining. I belive i got the easiest samples to get at first which were got from the strings with a q- tip.
After UV and the strings were gone, I was scooping sand and looking at those samples of all Amphidinium. |
A few points. Quoted and bolded for the observations that are in line with everything I've seen from amphidinium and ostreopsis, and can help people ID their dinos a little more easily.
Mine went reverse. I never saw an osti until I got rid of my amphidinium.
And PREDATION. I think it's an under appreciated key to sand-dwelling dino control. That was the key for getting rid of my amphidinium, lots of dino predators that could remove the dinos once I slowed their growth rate. I've seen ciliates of several different genera having ingested dinos, and I've also seen your micro polycheate worms in my sand too, coinciding approximately with the time that the amphidinium disappeared from the sand. And although I've never seen large numbers of dinos in their opaque gut, I had lots of pods too. And the literature says pods (moreso) and ciliates (less, usually) are important predators of dinos in the wild.
Ostis on the other had, with their ability to attach in strings to high flow areas far away from the substrate does a good job of insulating them from predators. Not that some things won't eat them given the opportunity (I have shots of ciliates that love munching ostis) just that osti's growth habit lessens those opportunities.