The Guide to get rid of dinoflagellates

[redfishsc]

Originally Posted by shackman

Whats the best way and fastest way to get my nitrates up, feeding is the only thing I can think of.

Sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, or calcium nitrate. Any of these will work, and most you can find on Ebay.

I have agricultural grade calcium nitrate, works fine if I ever use it. I think a 5lb bag of it was like $10 and it's more nitrate than you'd ever need.


Dosing it is VERY tricky b/c you don't know for sure how much a teeny pinch will raise your nitrates in the tank.

With a little math and testing, you can figure it out.


Do this:

First buy the Salifert Nitrate kit. It reads at VERY low levels, and high levels, which is what you'll need. It's a very good kit.

Add 1/8 tsp (or 1/4, whichever you have a measuring device for) to one gallon of RO/DI water. This is your NITRATE SOLUTION that you will dose from.

Test nitrates with whatever kit you have. Should be off the charts.


Add one teaspoon of this NITRATE SOLUTION to a different gallon of clean RO water. Mix well. Test for nitrates. You should get a reading. If not, add another teaspoon of the NITRATE SOLUTION to the gallon of test-water.


Now you know how much NITRATE SOLUTION you need to raise one gallon of water to whatever number you got.


Now, to figure out how much you need to dose into the tank. Let's say, for example, that ONE teaspoon of NITRATE SOLUTION raised the gallon of clean water by 1ppm.


If your tank holds 100 gallons, you'd need 100 teaspoons of NITRATE SOLUTION to raise your water by 1ppm.


I do not recommend you raise it more than 1ppm per day. I don't recall how much the OP used per day.

[GlassReef]

Can anyone else report success with this method? The OP did a great job of explaining his thoughts and methods, but hearing about additional successes would be interesting.

[redfishsc]

I personally have not. I've always been able to whip dinoflagellates with heavy kalk dosing, lights-out for 3 days, lots of siphoning, and heavy refugium growth.

I haven't dosed any vodka or other carbon source yet to rid dinoflagellates b/c I haven't had any hit my system, and I seriously doubt they could grow in my system right now for low nutrients (phosphate in particular).

[Frick-n-Frags]

^the problem with feeding is all the PO4 that comes with the protein.

as mentioned above, go with a pure inorganic nitrate source like calcium nitrate or potasium nitrate. then you have no doubt you are ONLY adding NO3

----------------------------------------
i'm not making any conclusions, but i have been eutrifying the algae population out of my 100+ gal system which contains one fish who gets a pinch of flake once a week.(blenny ). i have been slow cooking my system for over 2 years and running the skimmer the whole time. i am down to one pest: dinos. everything else has starved out or i have removed it(valonia especially) to the point where the few strays are minimal % of the algae population remaining.

i have been at a loss as to how to "super low nutrient" this, as all readings have been zero for a long time now.
this thread does offer a possibility as to why i have hit the wall.

[ArgonDreams]

Isn't the freshwater plant supliment "flourish" Potassium Nitrate?

[redfishsc]

Not "Flourish" (which is a mineral supplement and has no nitrogen).

"Flourish Nitrogen" contains both potassium nitrate (fine) and urea (not so fine). I personally would not dose anything containing urea into a tank unless someone else experimented on their corals first, lol.

[v3pulsar]

i had this problem..i went to the beach got big sized hermit crabs,!.. and walla..no more dinoflagellates...

[CorkPullerPHL]

I had a 4 month outbreak. Turned out my DI resin was dead. Stopped water changes, cut back on feeding. They were gone in two weeks.

The Op's method is certainly a novel approach, and I'd like to see some controlled experiments. I wonder how much of his success had to do with stopping water changes, and how much was a result of the increased nitrate. A good read nonetheless.

[plancton]

As an update for this method:

1. I´m no longer sure the raising nitrate method is what works. Adding Nitrogen to do so its probably risky for your other organisms.

2. Most likely what did the job was to just stop waterchanges. There´s absolutely no doubt they feed on trace elements in the salt mix. Avoiding waterchanges deprives them of their food. They prefer high end salinity, when I had them my hydrometer was badly calibrated and was reading 1.024 when in reality it was 1.030. My guessing is that higher salinity means higher trace element concentration thus more food for them.

3. Honestly, using ROWA phos is always wise, but it doesn´t guarantee a solution since I have very good water quality and no phos according to electronic tests, just running a reactor with ROWA didn´t seem to make much of a difference.

4. There seems to be different types of Dinoflagellates. Some are supposed to be toxic to fish and invertebrates that eat them and to be sensible to high ph and die.
I did not have that kind, I raised my ph to a daily range of 8.5 to 8.7 and did nothing to them, also they didn´t seem to be toxic to the organisms that eat them.
My dinos did not get that affected by lights out, they needed at least 3 days of lights out to start dying and then they would come back so fast that lights out were pointless.

5. They feed on anything that can feed bacteria such as carbon dosing (vodka), amminos and coral food (prodibio reef booster).
After 1 year and a half free of dinos they just came back but I´m keeping them on control. Here´s what triggered their return:

Vodka dosing, ammino dosing, reef booster dosing, accidentaly raised salinity to 1.026(still good although high end) and weekly waterchanges. Vodka dosing seemed to be the first thing to slowly bring them back. I inmediately stopped waterchanges and after a week they began to dissapear, then I dosed prodibio reefbooster and the next morning I saw a 100% increase. Then I did a waterchange and the day after there was another very noticeable increase in their population.

Absolutely demonstrating my theories. I have just tested everything and phos is 0 on an electronic phos meter, I am using rowa right now just in case, nitrates are 0 too, and the only algae that grows in my tank right now is red cotton candy algae, which is known to grow in nutrient deprived tanks such as zeovit, these are indications that indeed the water quality is so good and so dinos feed mostly on trace elements, carbon, amminos and light.

So the absolute cure is just to avoid waterchanges as long as possible, not add carbon source such as vodka, stop coral food and aminos, wanna bet it will work?, it sure will. In my tank avoiding waterchanges is easy because I have a very good skimmer, low bioload, and good water quality, and even after 2 months of no waterchanes my nitrates raise to 1-2ppm which is really low.
The only drawbacks is that corals start becoming a bit pale in the abscence of weekly water changes but its a small sacrifice to get rid of dinos. And once they´re gone, weekly waterchanges can bring back the colors real fast, with caution of not triggering another dino boom.

Dinos are seasonal, they come back in springtime, right now in my town its spring time and they came back.

[ReefTECK]

It sounds like my problem is nearly identical to what you have been through. In the way that my dosing/feeding/water changes had profound effects in the onset of this nusance. Also this dino sounds like it responds to the same stimulus as the one I am battling, dark barely phases them, pH doesn't.

Although, mine doesn't look the same exactly, it's a little darker, not as bubbly, and a large amount of the strings I'm getting are right directly on the coral branches and tips themselves.

Have you lost any of your corals to this infection? Have you had any of this stuff growing on your sps tips?

I've been using the same approach and method, as well as vigorous use of a turkey baster to blow dino slime off of sps tips. It's really been rough, especially when the corals were responding so amazingly well to food. Color and PE had never been more awesome right around the time this began it's onset.

It only took a week.

Regards,
Andy

[plancton]

When I had it all over it started to also grow on the tips of acros like you say. Now that its back it looks darker and less bubbly, actually in my experience that's a sign that it isn't thriving as good as it can, and it hasn't started growing on corals yet, its mostly in the bottom of the tank.

This latest boom has been under control, a few days ago it was almost gone when I skipped the weekly waterchange but then the dosing of reef booster and the waterchange one day after make it come back strong, so from this point on no waterchanges in at least a month, I bet that will kill them.

Its just that many people with this problem start thinking their water is dirt and start doing lots of waterchanges, that's why they never get rid of them and only get worst. As long as you skip waterchanges you will quickly win the battle.

[beuchat]

I killed them with ozone in 24 hours.

[willray]

Originally Posted by beuchat

I killed them with ozone in 24 hours.

Can you elaborate on this?

[velvetelvis]

+1 I've been fighting these hateful things for two months now. And like the OP said, the aggravating thing is that my water tests out perfect--no detectable phosphates or nitrates, no ammonia, pH and alk right where they need to be. I'd been wiping down the glass with unbleached paper towels (sounds goofy, but it was recommended to me by a guy who runs a coral farm and it really did seem to help), cutting back on water changes, and keeping the pH up. All of this seemed to be slowly bringing them under control.

Then I had to remove a large amount of macroalgae (Caulerpa ashmeadii) from my tank because it was getting covered with crud and interfering with the flow in the tank, causing cyanobacteria outbreaks. Since the macro was rooted in the sand, you can imagine the dinoflagellate explosion the next day.

I'm especially worried because I have an anemone (RBTA clone). I can't futz around too much with salinity levels or leave the lights off for a few days. And I don't want the nem to suffer from lack of water changes while I try to get rid of this plague. I'm hoping beuchat has some more advice to share, because I know he keeps anemones, too.

[dublo8]

here is a link to a current thread. http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh...1962886&page=5

[merritt32]

nasty stuff!!!!!

[PTang81]

guys need yr help!!!


Can dinoflagellates spread from one tank to another?? setting up a new tank but tank I have now has dinoflagellates shall i discard all coral from my old tank containing dinos?

thanks

[PTang81]

guys need yr help!!!


Can dinoflagellates spread from one tank to another?? setting up a new tank but tank I have now has dinoflagellates shall i discard all coral from my old tank containing dinos?

thanks

[spollock818]

If carbon dosing is helping, then I doubt you have "perfect water". What I've expeienced is when I carbon dose, some algae dies off, but then what ever dominate alga you have now has that much more nutrients to take over. That along with dino being a cross over between algae and bacteria, makes me wonder if dosing really could help.

I know in my tank, I have had, and still do have dinos. If I dose, they come out like crazy, so I dont dose, do WC, and they are barely visable

[Fish.Rookie]

I have a 12 gallon nano cube (my first ever aquarium, for about 9 months now), and issues have been constantly arising, snail death, unhappy corals, cyano, hair algae, etc. I have gotten several different answers as to possible causes and fixes for these things, but I have had a bit of an infestation of brown/slimy/bubbly stuff for a few months now, and am beginning to wonder if they are dinoflagellates and if they could be the sole cause of my troubles.
soo....
a) how do I know if they are dinoflagellates?
b) If they are, how do I know if their the type that will respond to nitrates?
c) What is a way to rid my tank of the dinos that won't break the bank?

[markster33139]

I also had the same issue with dinos, for almost a year. To me it was triggered by vodka dosing, and I tried the lights out for 4 days with no luck either. I also got rid of the sand bed, and so far no dinos for 2 months. As an added bonus, maintenance is now really easy also, never going back to sand.



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[reefgeezer]

Some salt mixes have "vitamins" added. IMO the extra carbon in them can feed dino's. I don't think that inorganic trace elements (other than phosphate and nitrate) have much, if any, impact on Dino growth.

I use Kent salt and do 12% weekly water changes. It has some sort of vitamin added. When I occasionally see signs of Dino's: I suck all traces of it from the system while doing a bigger than normal water change with Instant Ocean; add GAC; and do a 3 day lights out. I did this twice last year. Seems to work.

[Fish.Rookie]

Will lights out for that long (three days like you said) upset anything in the tank? corals especially, mine are a little stressed right now and I don't want to worsen the problem.

~also, should I feed during lights out, or would that just confuse everyone?

[reefgeezer]

Three or even more days without light or food won't hurt the coral or fish.

[Fish.Rookie]

well ,I've done a little under three days with no lights, and a heavy towel on top of the tank, and while the lights were out there were no signs of dinos, but once the lights were back on the dinos came back after a day. They're really stressing out my corals, and I'm pretty sure they're effecting my snails, too!