Dinos and My Parameters

[IndyReef78]

I appreciated all the help that I received when I first posted about this issue. I have come to the conclusion that I'm definitely dealing with dinoflagellates. I tried ChemiClean because I was going back and forth between Cyano or Dino, but the Chemiclean made zero difference. I am going to post my parameters and what I've been doing over the last week or so, in the hopes that someone will have some ideas if I'm on the right path or if I need to be trying something different.

We've added a TON of pods over the last week as well, and the lights have been either at 5% or off entirely until yesterday, but we still have quite a bit of dinos on the sand and rocks. Any thoughts?

Christina

 

[Formulator]

Patience would be my main suggestion. And just leave the skimmer off for a week. Need to get your nitrates up and keep them there for at least a month and the dinos will eventually die off. It just takes time my friend.

You magnesium is also very low, but likely not a factor in your dino issue. Still I would raise to at least 1300. No need to go super slow with raising it. You can do 50-100 ppm adjustments per day without hurting anything.

 

[IndyReef78]

Patience would be my main suggestion. And just leave the skimmer off for a week. Need to get your nitrates up and keep them there for at least a month and the dinos will eventually die off. It just takes time my friend.

You magnesium is also very low, but likely not a factor in your dino issue. Still I would raise to at least 1300. No need to go super slow with raising it. You can do 50-100 ppm adjustments per day without hurting anything.

Thank you. We are working on raising the magnesium, but it seems to be moving slowly. I appreciate your thoughts and it's helpful to know that it's just going to take time!

 

[Formulator]

Thank you. We are working on raising the magnesium, but it seems to be moving slowly. I appreciate your thoughts and it's helpful to know that it's just going to take time!

Yep, magnesium adjustments take a LOT of mag solution. Like you probably need a couple liters to get it to 1300.

Edit: couple liters is what it would take in my 130g system I meant

 

[taricha]

Ca 340 and Mg 1130 could also just mean your salinity is 10-20% low.

 

[Solo McReefer]

I appreciated all the help that I received when I first posted about this issue. I have come to the conclusion that I'm definitely dealing with dinoflagellates. I tried ChemiClean because I was going back and forth between Cyano or Dino, but the Chemiclean made zero difference. I am going to post my parameters and what I've been doing over the last week or so, in the hopes that someone will have some ideas if I'm on the right path or if I need to be trying something different.

We've added a TON of pods over the last week as well, and the lights have been either at 5% or off entirely until yesterday, but we still have quite a bit of dinos on the sand and rocks. Any thoughts?

Christina

How old is the tank?

I mean, when did you add the salt water and bacteria culture

A FTS pic would be helpful

What salt are you using? What is your SG or PPT?

 

[Gumbies R Us]

I appreciated all the help that I received when I first posted about this issue. I have come to the conclusion that I'm definitely dealing with dinoflagellates. I tried ChemiClean because I was going back and forth between Cyano or Dino, but the Chemiclean made zero difference. I am going to post my parameters and what I've been doing over the last week or so, in the hopes that someone will have some ideas if I'm on the right path or if I need to be trying something different.

We've added a TON of pods over the last week as well, and the lights have been either at 5% or off entirely until yesterday, but we still have quite a bit of dinos on the sand and rocks. Any thoughts?

Christina

Salinity level? What about a picture of your tank

 

[IndyReef78]

How old is the tank?

I mean, when did you add the salt water and bacteria culture

A FTS pic would be helpful

What salt are you using? What is your SG or PPT?

The tank is 3 months old or so, maybe older. It had fully cycled (time and Dr. Tim's bacteria and used bioballs from a local fish store to add diversity to the bacteria) and then we started adding fish. We are using the Red Sea Blue bag (not the Coral Pro, but I think that we will be switching after this bag.) I will try to take a full tank shot tomorrow sometime. The lights are out now and I just got done trying to manually remove some of the dinos, so it's a bit of a mess at the moment! We try to keep the salinity at 1.026 and we have our own mixing station. this last time, we did have a bit of a struggle getting the salinity where we wanted it. I'll have to double-check it in the tank tomorrow.

 

[IndyReef78]

Salinity level? What about a picture of your tank

I'll try to get the photo and the salinity for you tomorrow - I've got to run and pick up my son from band camp and take him to a sleepover in a few minutes!

 

[IndyReef78]

Ok, so I was finally able to get away from work and test the salinity and take some full white light tank pictures. They are not pretty. Hopefully this will help somehow because the tank looks awful right now.

The salinity is 1.031, which I don't understand, because when we did the most recent water change, we tested the new batch of water (using Red Sea Blue bag salt) and it was testing at 1.026, which is our goal. We have an auto top off that adds fresh RODI water as needed. Could this be a bad batch of salt somehow?

 

[mylittlejade]

I have a 5 month old tank that went through Dino’s. I have always had the luxury of sourcing live rock until this tank, which wasn’t a big deal until I was hit with Dino’s. You might be in for a haul but it’s well worth the fight and wait! If you have macro (or similar) rock you might just have to go through the motions with the tank until it settles in.

If you want to attack the problem I listed my process below.

- UV 24hrs
- 5 day lights out while doing the below.
- Hang filter floss in the tank 24hrs and rinse or replace daily.
- Replace or rinse filter floss in sump daily.
- Blow off rocks every night so the filter floss catches what doesn’t come off.
- test phosphates daily and keep them at 1 or above.
- Suck out affected sand as much as possible (just the gunk on the surface).

I tried peroxide but I don’t think it helped much to be honest. Be persistent and you will come out of this.

Good luck.

Bryan

 

[IndyReef78]

I have a 5 month old tank that went through Dino’s. I have always had the luxury of sourcing live rock until this tank, which wasn’t a big deal until I was hit with Dino’s. You might be in for a haul but it’s well worth the fight and wait! If you have macro (or similar) rock you might just have to go through the motions with the tank until it settles in.

If you want to attack the problem I listed my process below.

- UV 24hrs
- 5 day lights out while doing the below.
- Hang filter floss in the tank 24hrs and rinse or replace daily.
- Replace or rinse filter floss in sump daily.
- Blow off rocks every night so the filter floss catches what doesn’t come off.
- test phosphates daily and keep them at 1 or above.
- Suck out affected sand as much as possible (just the gunk on the surface).

I tried peroxide but I don’t think it helped much to be honest. Be persistent and you will come out of this.

Good luck.

Bryan

I'm sorry you had to deal with this too. While we have some live rock in the sump, the display tank (and what a display it is at the moment!) is the CaribSea (I think) dry rock. We have done the lights out and it just keeps coming back. I spent a long time last night sucking everything I could out of the sand, and if anything, it looks worse today. The phosphates are up, nitrates are rising with dosing. I'll look into the filter floss. I'm not familiar with that. We had turned off the skimmer and reef mat for a week or so, now the skimmer is back on at 15%. We tried so hard to do everything right this time around - that's what is so frustrating. I appreciate your help and will look into your suggestions.

 

[IndyReef78]

I wanted to post a quick update and thank everyone for their words of wisdom and help. As of today, the tank looks 1000% better. I suspect a few things helped, but we saw the biggest turnaround after we installed the UV sterilizer. We weren't really seeing any changes until then - but wow, what a difference that made and in a relatively short time. We finally got it installed late Thursday evening and by Saturday the difference was noticeable. Today, the sand is essentially clean and white again and all the stringy brown stuff is gone from the rocks. The corals are all starting to look much happier and an anemone that we thought we had lost has been found and looks pretty happy too (although it has located itself on the back of the rocks where it is hard to see!) All in all, I think we're finally on the right track.

 

[PharmrJohn]

Yep. Depending on the type of dinos, UV can get rid of them fast. Those pods will help keep them at bay now. They eat them up. There are videos on YouTube showing pods eating dinos. They really plow through them.