Dinoflagellates.

[nvladik]

Quick update on the dyno scrubber, if you are just looking to lower your numbers before hitting them with UV, Dirty Method, or anything else, scrubber is working. After 2 days, it was full of dynos, and I barely see any on Rock, Sand, etc.

[joshky]

Originally Posted by Billybatz9

What did you do?

I posted what I had done a few posts up. You can read/see more in my tank thread in my signature.

Originally Posted by joshky

I tried multiple tactics to rid my tank of dinos and only just recently feel like I won the battle. It was dramatic and I doubt many would do this, but I chose to get rid of my old rock and 75% of my old sand and replaced it with TBS 2.1 live rock and live sand from the Gulf. The thing that stood out to me in all of this was biodiversity is a key component to not having issues with dinos, since the switch on 2-27-16 I haven't had another issue with dinos and I know it's still in my system, the point wasn't to "remove" it, but to make it hard for it to take over. Since the switch my SPS have already started recovering from pretty bad STN and browning out, so I'm really encouraged right now and I hope that I don't see them again.

FWIW the 30g package I chose from TBS was similar in price ($550~ after air freight cost) to the UV sterilizers I was looking at to rid my tank of dinos, this rock is a lot more interesting than another piece of equipment to clutter my sump area.

[karimwassef]

Originally Posted by jweist

There's no way your skimmer is pulling all the dying organics out before they turn into inorganics.

Here's my skimmer











daily output is 2qts of liquid waste



It's a dual Beckett injected 12' tall skimmer.



The solid waste builds up every month. I don't weight it (maybe I should), but a picture is worth 1000 words:





It may be a DIY, but it's the best skimmer I've seen.

Always surprised at opinions without seeing it

[karimwassef]

I also employ a 6' ATS scrubber that generates about 250g every two weeks

[karimwassef]

I think it's safe to say - I get "export"...

I feed massive quantities of food a day too. I see nutrients as fuel for my machine.

I also consume about a Kg of Kalkwasser powder a month... Just to avoid any assumptions

[karimwassef]

[jason2459]

I think there's a Trump like joke in there somewhere...

[karimwassef]

What? The I get "export" bit?

I said EXport, not DEport.

[jweist]

Originally Posted by karimwassef

Here's my skimmer
daily output is 2qts of liquid waste
The solid waste builds up every month. I don't weight it (maybe I should), but a picture is worth 1000 words:
It may be a DIY, but it's the best skimmer I've seen.
Always surprised at opinions without seeing it

That's a cool DIY skimmer and I'm sure it works well. But the fact that there is algae growing on the screen means the skimmer is not grabbing all organics before they break down into inorganics.
Lack of biodiversity at the bottom of the food change is what allows dinos to flourish. This happens much easier at low nutrient levels because the competition in the tank is almost nonexistent. Algae will not grow (in the display) at these low nutrient levels without maximizing light, flow and attachment with an ATS.

[karimwassef]

back when I had dinos, I wasn't feeding as much... or exporting as much.

In fact, my big extinction event was using LaCl. It crashed my phosphates so quickly that all algae melted in 24hrs and gave dinos a foothold.

I hit them with everything. First UV, then wet skimming + carbon + new chaeto + new live rock + blackout + thousands of pods + phyto. Then I cranked up my feeding and installed an ATS...

Now it's all going full blast. I still run UV at night... and in case you think that's killing my biodiversity - look at my videos. As long as I feed phyto and turn off my skimmer at night, my plankton base stays thick and the dino s are non-existent.

[koral_lover]

joining this party.

my tank is 8 months old - a month after stocking several sps, dinos have hit.

I am not sure the reason. My theory is that I overdosed nitrate, which drove my phosphate down to nothing, then dinos got a foot hold.

I am grateful this thread exists. I have done a black out 2 weeks ago, they all melted, but slowly came back. I could keep them at bay if I fed minimally and skimmed hard, but my sps were suffering and pale. I realize I can't go on like this.

I am going to try the dirty method and see if I can get some other algaes or cyano growing.

Started three days ago. It is painful to watch - I am literally dumping in the food morning and night and the dinos have gone crazy in terms of growth. It seems I need to let them get worse before I see other algaes popping up.

I do notice a lot more pod action on the glass.

What is really strange - ever since I got dinos, I can't get any green film or brown dusting on the glass - even after several days...

Will update anyone with my results - Really depressed, my sps are pale or brown, no growth, no 2 part consumption, and fish seem stressed. I hope my tank comes through.

Feeding 2 cubes of PE mysis, dose of Fuel, 1 flake feeding, and 1 cube of cyclopeeze at night. Skimmer is now off. Just running chaeto - lit 24/7 in sump.

[karimwassef]

why ?

You're ok taking the risk killing your SPS when a slow flow UV and wet skimming in blackout will give you the position to reset your tank's chemistry? then add phyto and a little food to establish your algae and you can change the vector of life in the tank.

I understand wanting to avoid paying $70 for a 36W UV sterilizer if you just have a couple of fish or some softies or LPS... but seeing SPS die for that little seems ..............

just my clearly biased opinion and earnest desire to help.

[jweist]

Originally Posted by karimwassef

back when I had dinos, I wasn't feeding as much... or exporting as much.

Exporting what skimmate? That would make sense since it has less food to pull out.

I hit them with everything. First UV, then wet skimming + carbon + new chaeto + new live rock + blackout + thousands of pods + phyto. Then I cranked up my feeding and installed an ATS...
Now it's all going full blast. I still run UV at night... and in case you think that's killing my biodiversity - look at my videos. As long as I feed phyto and turn off my skimmer at night, my plankton base stays thick and the dino s are non-existent.

I don't want to critique your system plus you don't have dinos in your tank so why would I... I will say though that if your adding live phyto then every night when your UV comes on it would be killing it and creating more food for pods. So instead of using the phyto to suck up inorganics, you're using it more as a food source (fine either way).
When you tell me your story I don't see it the same way as you... what I see is that you tried a bunch of different approaches that were not working so you added an ATS and now you have no dinos.

Originally Posted by koral_lover

I could keep them at bay if I fed minimally and skimmed hard, but my sps were suffering and pale. I realize I can't go on like this.

Dinos aren't growing as much because there is less nutrients in the water but on the other hand your corals are suffering from lack of food. So by skimming hard your taking out almost all the corals food but leaving the inorganics that the dinos can still eat up.

I do notice a lot more pod action on the glass.

There's more food in the water for pods... they don't care if they're eating dinos, phyto, or GHA... in any case their population is limited by available food.

What is really strange - ever since I got dinos, I can't get any green film or brown dusting on the glass - even after several days...

That's because the dinos are eating up the inorganics before the algae on the glass has a chance to.

Originally Posted by karimwassef

You're ok taking the risk killing your SPS when a slow flow UV and wet skimming in blackout will give you the position to reset your tank's chemistry? then add phyto and a little food to establish your algae and you can change the vector of life in the tank.
I understand wanting to avoid paying $70 for a 36W UV sterilizer if you just have a couple of fish or some softies or LPS... but seeing SPS die for that little seems ..............just my clearly biased opinion and earnest desire to help.

See this is what is getting to me... you have an ATS and no dinos but every time you give advise you leave this giant detail out. I appreciate you giving help it's just your advise of getting a UV sterilizer as the main fix is not a good solution. First of all it's not proven at all that the UV can eliminate dinos to a point where other algae can take over. Second it's expensive... $70 minimum where as an ATS could could cost less than 20 bucks. And third is that between UV, skimming, and blackouts there is nothing here to control/export the nutrients that will be released from the die off caused by UV and blackouts. This would only perpetuate the dinos. I can also say that loosing my corals especially the sps is not OK with me. I would spend a lot of money for this not to happen... but if there is a big possibility this is going to happen anyway then what would be the point of spending money on a UV sterilizer or anything else for that matter.

[taricha]

Originally Posted by koral_lover

I am not sure the reason. My theory is that I overdosed nitrate, which drove my phosphate down to nothing, then dinos got a foot hold.

I have done a black out 2 weeks ago, they all melted, but slowly came back.

I am going to try the dirty method and see if I can get some other algaes or cyano...

What is really strange - ever since I got dinos, I can't get any green film or brown dusting on the glass - even after several days...

Lots of the above resonates with my experience. I dosed nitrates to drop my P, killed off my GHA and poof....dinos.

Blackouts and dino-cidal chemicals...
So you remove dinos. Great. What did you replace them with?
I think we need this as a slogan, to remove dinos you must first decide what to replace them with. We need something catchy in the form of a bumper sticker or kung fu proverb.
"In dinos, there is no remove. There is only replace." Hopefully someone else can do better.

Cyano is a no no. Dinos and cyano are BFFs and joined at the hip. It's not a candidate for replacing dinos.

Just throwing food in the tank does not automatically ensure you'll have elevated N and P. Quite often they are out of balance and one is elevated while the other is limiting factor for growth. Test and adjust.

[jweist]

great answer.

[pdiehm]

So if you have no nitrates, no phosphates (in my case no corals), how is it possible that Dino's can survive?

[jweist]

Originally Posted by pdiehm

So if you have no nitrates, no phosphates (in my case no corals), how is it possible that Dino's can survive?

You don't have zero if they are growing... you need something to fight with them for the available nutrients.

[taricha]

"Zero" nutrients isn't zero. It's a small amount constantly going into the water column from biological processes, coupled with that small amount being taken up by other biological processes almost as soon as it enters.

In your case, dinos are doing the uptake maybe directly, or maybe through some bacterial friends of theirs.

[pdiehm]

Originally Posted by jweist

You don't have zero if they are growing... you need something to fight with them for the available nutrients.

ok, it's been said you need to replace them with something, such as?

Essentially what I'm asking is, if you go into a low nutrient system, such as a zeovit, or prodibio, or whatever, the thinking is there's such low nutrients in the water, that "in theory" no nuisance algae can grow, let alone survive.

In zeovit for example, they say to remove the PO4 reactor, and take the refugium out because once the system takes hold, there's no nutrients to grow the macro-algae.

In the thread, I've seen you remove the dino's, but you need to replace them with something else, but haven't seen anyone say, these are what you can replace the dino's with?

Having said that, i looked on the reefcleaners website, and the fuzz growing on my rocks, may not have been dino's, but looks a lot like Calothrix. The stuff only grew on my rocks, looked very much like peach fuzz. Not once did it grow on the sand or substrate.

[jweist]

Originally Posted by pdiehm

ok, it's been said you need to replace them with something, such as?

algae

Essentially what I'm asking is, if you go into a low nutrient system, such as a zeovit, or prodibio, or whatever, the thinking is there's such low nutrients in the water, that "in theory" no nuisance algae can grow, let alone survive.

Yeah, this is the problem. When we artificially take the nutrients out of the water we are starving the bottom of the food chain and it isn't able thrive. If you look at a trophic pyramid of the ocean, aglae and phyto are at the bottom and are the biggest portion of the model. In the conditions like your describing the model gets flipped upside down because proportionally you have very little algae compared to the top of the pyramid. We know that if dinos are growing then is safe to say you have some sort of nutrients in the water. Under low nutrient conditions (not zero) algae is not able to grow in the tank because light, flow, and attachment is not used to its full potential. When there is low nutrients and no algae anywhere in the system dinos are able to thrive like green hair algae in a high nutrient tank.

In the thread, I've seen you remove the dino's, but you need to replace them with something else, but haven't seen anyone say, these are what you can replace the dino's with?

I have, algae. I'm saying that in order to do this using the "clean method" you need to maximize the conditions that grow algae. These are light, flow, and attachment and without a scrubber this can not be done.

[koral_lover]

Originally Posted by taricha

Lots of the above resonates with my experience. I dosed nitrates to drop my P, killed off my GHA and poof....dinos.

Blackouts and dino-cidal chemicals...
So you remove dinos. Great. What did you replace them with?
I think we need this as a slogan, to remove dinos you must first decide what to replace them with. We need something catchy in the form of a bumper sticker or kung fu proverb.
"In dinos, there is no remove. There is only replace." Hopefully someone else can do better.

Cyano is a no no. Dinos and cyano are BFFs and joined at the hip. It's not a candidate for replacing dinos.

Just throwing food in the tank does not automatically ensure you'll have elevated N and P. Quite often they are out of balance and one is elevated while the other is limiting factor for growth. Test and adjust.

It is not possible for me to test and adjust - Hanna and Nitrate readings always show 0. The dinos are taking them up too quickly to test and adjust. What should I throw in the tank to ensure I am achieving a balance in elevating both N and P appropriately to stimulate GHA? Is there an ideal food or amino acid? Btw - noticed a little bit of GHA growing on my powerhead today...how can I make it spread...hmmm

[jweist]

Here is what I did once I got my scrubber up and running. I took this advise directly from Floyd R Turbo on the algae scrubber site and I think he got it from Santa Monica originally. I only slightly deviate from this advise but all the main principles are followed. Many people have successfully used this method, some even more than once.

In my experience, it stays in the scrubber as long as you have surface skimming i.e. overflow in the display tank. There are many methods that are suggested to keep it under control, I know there are a few articles out there, here's a few from googling "dinoflagellates reef"

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-11/rhf/index.php

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/blog...ons-i-learned/

Most involve raising the pH to 8.4 (especially at night - scrubber can help this) but that can be difficult to do, so at least keep your alk high enough to maintain proper pH and run your scrubber lights all night if you can.

Many solutions mention cutting back the DT lights (even a 3-day total blackout in extreme cases, but this doesn't solve the root problem), but SM told me to do the opposite and it actually worked. I think the idea is that if you provide the coral a lot of light, they will consume the nutrients and starve out the dinos. Of course you need a lot of photosynthetic corals for that to work I would think. But cutting the lights out completely will generally cause more die-off which then feeds the dinos, so I guess I hate to go against the recommendations of Randy Holmes-Farley, but it seemed to work for me, so it's up to you.

Cut feeding drastically in any case, only feed a small amount right before lights out is what I did, and every other day or every 3 days if your fish can take it.

Basically you're keeping the fish alive and letting the corals and CUC (and scrubber) drain the nutrients out of the tank and starving out the dinos.

Keep the scrubber running, if they're still wanting to grow, they'll grow there and that's where to want them - where you can control them.

If you have a place for filter floss, a sock, or a pad, put that there too to keep the dinos from recirculating in the system, or to catch them if they detach from the scrubber. I had tons of dinos in my UAS until it started growing green, but very little signs of detachment. In the top-of-tank waterfall scrubber, I had much more detachment, most of which snagged on a block of bio-balls that I had set up as a bubble-blocker. So do what you have to do to trap them.

Also I take a piece of airline tubing and siphon off the dinos out of the DT when I see them. They come back pretty quick so this is something you need to stay on top of on a daily basis. Using this method and pinching the airline hose when not sucking the dinos I was able to only empty out about 1/4-1/2 gallon in a 120g system, and I had dinos everywhere. Also get all the dinos off the top surface in low-flow areas (if you have them)

The hardest coral to keep happy was my ORA Green Birdsnest, you can drop those things on the ground and step on them and they'll survive but dinos take them out because they're 'snaggy' - they are a dino magnet.

[Billybatz9]

One thing I have noticed is that dinos don't like coraline algae. I think I am going to start raising calcium and magnesium to start increasing my coraline growth. They don't attach to coraline rocks.

As for the other dinos... Does dosing mb7, dr tims one and only, and etc... help promoto biodiversity? Or do we need biodiversity from live rocks?

[bertoni]

If you want to add fixed nitrogen and phosphate to the water column, sodium nitrate and some form of sodium phosphate should be fine, if you get a food-grade mixture. Sodium nitrate can be a bit hard to find, but I think it's possible.

[nvladik]

Dyno scrubber update day 3. Don't see a single spot on rock or sand anymore.



Guys what should I aim for Phosphates? Got Nitrates now for sure as I miss dosed!