Amphidinium Dinoflagellate Treatment Methods

[Javamahn]

Thanks for that detailed update! I'm on pretty much the same exact path and situation. In an effort to boost biodiversity I just added 6lbs of Walt Smiths Fiji Mud to tank and refugium last night. Today i just had 5 lbs of garf grunge and 5 lbs of grunge plus arrive at my house. Added some stuff from indo pacific sea farms last week (snails, worms, stars, snails). I already have a healthy population of pods and other worms.

I'm holding off on silicate dosing just to see what impact this all has.

Following

 

[CDavmd]

Still battling...siphoning every weekend, feeding, etc.....Nutrients have been stable and elevated for months. No real progress. So what happens if there is no sand for them to attach to? As I siphon I am gradually losing sand and I'm tempted to just siphon it ALL out for now.

 

[eraserhead187]

Several months ago, I suddenly got a nasty infestation of Ostreopsis ovata. I managed to stay on top of it to the point that I never had any losses other than snails. What worked for me was the following combination: UV, peroxide, Vibrant, and increasing nutrients via increased feedings, while avoiding water changes. They are gone, and disappeared relatively quickly. I can't find a single cell anywhere. However, once they were gone, the amphidinium and, to a lesser degree, coolia moved in and set up shop. Corals and fish are all doing great, but the dinos annoy me. They can go several days without getting much worse, but they are creepers. Since they are ugly to look at, and don't really leave the sand, I have been trying to come up with a way to deal with them. Glad I found this thread. I have not begun silica dosing yet, but have been getting things ready to begin if I have to.

What I did do though, is unhooked my UV sterilizer (which, as it turns out, had not even been on for f***s sake, apparently the one plug in the power strip that it was connected to was dead), got a cheap, crappy little 60gph pump, and hooked it up to the UV. No matter the wattage, 60gph should be slow enough to kill about anything that gets in there. I hooked the intake up to one of those little gravel vacuums, that is probably about an inch and a half in diameter. I then vacuumed the gravel where the dinos like to hang out with that. It seems that the 60gph was enough to suck them out of the sand. The UV sterilizer at the end of the run then just feeds back into the overflow. I'm trying to also avoid water changes, so I need to conserve this water, as my tank is only 34 gallons. I just did this a little bit ago, so no real results yet. I'll post an update when something happens, good or bad.

 

[Jaysin13]

Update on my situation :

The pics are my starting point. Not horrible but not pretty on the white sand.

My strategy was to feed heavy, raise nitrates and phosphates and vacuum daily

I dosed seachem flourish nitrogen till nitrate was 5ppm. Dosed seachem flourish nitrogen daily (seems to drop daily). Vacuum sand through a 10 micron sock daily. Quit water changes..... I eventually started dosing phyto also.

This routine went on for about a month and during this month I had brown fuzzy algae on rocks and power heads. Cuc kept it cool on the rocks. Coralline algae went from a pale red to dark purple and grew. Corals really colored up.

Sand started being cleaner. In the last 2 weeks I only vacuumed once and have done a water change as my nitrates have climbed to about 40ppm.

The dinos are hard to spot now! I still see some but have far less! Hard to spot if you don't know what you're looking for!

Plan now is to do a couple water changes to get nitrates back down to 5ppm. Keep dosing phosphates as needed but hopefully find a food and feeding schedule that can eliminate any dosing of these nutrients. Establish a water change schedule to maintain the correct levels. Not zero!

Hopefully these water changes don't flair em up and I'm winning this fight!!!

 

[taricha]

Update on my situation :

Is it just me or are the brown patches almost tracing the shadow lines?

What kind of lights do you have? And when during the light cycle were those pics taken (morning, afternoon?)
There's some interesting mechanism here that I'm missing.

 

[Jaysin13]

Is it just me or are the brown patches almost tracing the shadow lines?

What kind of lights do you have? And when during the light cycle were those pics taken (morning, afternoon?)
There's some interesting mechanism here that I'm missing.

Yes they were. Almost like they didn't like the brightest area. I have 2 current USA ic led bars and 4 ati t5 bulbs.
Full daylight.

 

[taricha]

Yes they were. Almost like they didn't like the brightest area. I have 2 current USA ic led bars and 4 ati t5 bulbs.
Full daylight.

Yep. Ostreopsis are known to be photosensitive, and need to take measures to protect themselves from maximum light exposure. In some areas they actually decrease during the peak of Summer and pick back up in early fall. researchers think it's because they can't handle that much light. But I've never heard of that with amphidinium.
I'd like that explanation better if you had said you ran metal halides. Hmmm.

 

[Jaysin13]

Yep. Ostreopsis are known to be photosensitive, and need to take measures to protect themselves from maximum light exposure. In some areas they actually decrease during the peak of Summer and pick back up in early fall. researchers think it's because they can't handle that much light. But I've never heard of that with amphidinium.
I'd like that explanation better if you had said you ran metal halides. Hmmm.

Sorry, not near metal halide strength..... Maybe I've just misdiagnosed the strain of dinos?? I never was able to get a really good look under the microscope but what I saw looked and acted like the examples given here.

 

[eraserhead187]

Mine seemed to hug the shadow lines too. I'm running some pretty intense LED, but have them dialed back.

 

[taricha]

Jaysin, you didn't mis-ID. These are presenting just like amphidinium and nothing like ostreopsis. I'm just saying this is behavior we hadn't really noted before.

I'm wondering about yall's physical bulb setup. Is light at the shadow line a different color, (pictures can deceive)? If some color bulbs are blocked and others aren't at the shadow line, then there could be a color band.
It may be the spectrum and not the intensity that they are using as a migratory cue to tell them where to go?
In the ocean spectrum varies with depth, so lots of organisms use it to choose a good spot.

 

[Jaysin13]

Jaysin, you didn't mis-ID. These are presenting just like amphidinium and nothing like ostreopsis. I'm just saying this is behavior we hadn't really noted before.

I'm wondering about yall's physical bulb setup. Is light at the shadow line a different color, (pictures can deceive)? If some color bulbs are blocked and others aren't at the shadow line, then there could be a color band.
It may be the spectrum and not the intensity that they are using as a migratory cue to tell them where to go?
In the ocean spectrum varies with depth, so lots of organisms use it to choose a good spot.

The leds ramp to 100% blue and 60% white.

 

[taricha]

I have been battling Dino for about 8 months which appear to be Large Cell Amphidinium (per taricha). I started reading this thread the first part of March 2018, on 03-18-18 I started dosing Seachem Flourish Phosphorus to get my P04 up to 0.10 as suggested by mcarroll and reeferfoxx, my N03 was already at 5 as I feed heavy, taricha suggested putting some chaeto in the main display which I did. I am happy to say that I am winning the battle with Dino, I now only have a dusting here and there on the sand, it is no longer building up on the coral or rocks and I am snot free at this time I do however have a bit of maroon cyano that is growing on top of the Dino, I have not messed with... it

Wanted to repost this from the other dino thread. Looks to be having some level of success with the Macroalgae Crowding method which is the second idea talked about in the First Post on this thread. This worked for me mutiple times vs Large Cell Amphidinium, hasn't yet been thoroughly tested by others.

 

[taricha]

The leds ramp to 100% blue and 60% white.

Interesting! so there is a band at the shadowline that gets light from the Blue+ & Coral+ (heavy blue spectrum) and not the LED whites.
I wonder if the rockwork shadow was 90 Degrees rotated so there was only a light gradient and no color gradient at the shadowline would we see the same pattern or not. hmmm....

 

[taricha]

Still battling...siphoning every weekend, feeding, etc.....Nutrients have been stable and elevated for months. No real progress. So what happens if there is no sand for them to attach to? As I siphon I am gradually losing sand and I'm tempted to just siphon it ALL out for now.

With no sand, this kind has a much harder time. It's very well adapted to sand grains. You can remove sand if you want and you will see progress, but I never would. I love my sand livestock too much.
When you say elevated nutrients for months and no progress, is green algae growing/increasing?

 

[CDavmd]

With no sand, this kind has a much harder time. It's very well adapted to sand grains. You can remove sand if you want and you will see progress, but I never would. I love my sand livestock too much.
When you say elevated nutrients for months and no progress, is green algae growing/increasing?

Thanks! Yes after I did a couple water changes as I mentioned in the other thread a while back the algae finally came back. As you had suggested the tank was probably low on some elements leading to no algae despite elevated nutrients and persistence of Dino’s.

I have turf algae on coral skeletons ( from power failure deaths), on my MP10’s, and film algae on my glass. The back glass has a brown film/ turf algae growing as well. The corals all look good. My montis have browned a bit and coralline has really taken off as of late. Interestingly my rock has little to no algae. The rock is now about 10-11 years old and has a good coating of coralline and bacteria which is why I believe algae can’t take hold on it.

I love my sand too but this tank is going to be shut down in the next few months as I complete my larger new build. My plan is to move these rocks and corals into the new system when it’s up and stable. I just don’t want to introduce the Dino’s over there if it’s even possible to avoid. Hence I’m willlng to lose the sand in the current tank if it will decrease the Dino’s inoculation into the new system when I make the transfer.

 

[eraserhead187]

The slow flow pump / sand vacuum / UV sterilizer thing is working. Significant reduction in amphidiunium. The affluent from the UV shows many dead amphidinium, some lysed, and the rest are moving slowly and irregularly. I am going to continue vacuuming any that I see daily. The tank went over the weekend with lights on their normal mode, and this afternoon there was much less of a dino explosion than there usually is. Vacuumed at around 1:30, and as on now there is nothing at all on the sand. Normally there would at least be the beginnings of some.

 

[Javamahn]

The slow flow pump / sand vacuum / UV sterilizer thing is working. Significant reduction in amphidiunium. The affluent from the UV shows many dead amphidinium, some lysed, and the rest are moving slowly and irregularly. I am going to continue vacuuming any that I see daily. The tank went over the weekend with lights on their normal mode, and this afternoon there was much less of a dino explosion than there usually is. Vacuumed at around 1:30, and as on now there is nothing at all on the sand. Normally there would at least be the beginnings of some.

I had to pull my sand and even with a 55watt UV I just can't seem to rid these buggers

 

[Jaysin13]

I dosed seachem flourish nitrogen to get to 5ppm nitrates. Worked great.

BUT I have been dosing seachem flourish phosphorus daily. Next day the tank tests at 0 again. Can anyone explain where my phosphates are going?

 

[coachb9]

Anyone tried dino-x before?

 

[coachb9]

Anyone tried dino-x before? I’m not making any headway