Dinos and Water Changes?

zachj7 · Oct 15, 2020

I've seen a few instances where people have recommended to others who are battling with dinos not to perform water changes. Can someone explain the reasoning behind this?

ScottR · Oct 15, 2020

zachj7 said:
I've seen a few instances where people have recommended to others who are battling with dinos not to perform water changes. Can someone explain the reasoning behind this?

Basically, you want to up your nutrients (no3/PO4) to help grow algae and biodiversity that will outcompete the dinos. Dinos typically thrive in an environment where they have little to no competition. Some people dose silicates because diatoms build their shells with them and directly compete with dinos.

piranhaman00 · Oct 15, 2020

Water changes wont hurt and can remove any toxins from dinos or other sources. Just dont let nutrients bottom out, so do w/c and dose no3 and po4 to make up for the w/c.

chipmunkofdoom2 · Oct 15, 2020

zachj7 said:
I've seen a few instances where people have recommended to others who are battling with dinos not to perform water changes. Can someone explain the reasoning behind this?

I've not yet seen any repeatable and methodical research that tests water changes, or lack thereof, against dinoflagellates. The reason people recommend stopping water changes is because it works in some cases. We don't know exactly why it works. For some cases, stopping water changes doesn't work.

The prevailing theory is that dinoflagellates use some trace or minor element in seawater to grow. Eventually they will deplete the element and their growth will be slowed. If you perform a water change, you are replenishing the trace elements that the dinoflagellates need to grow. So by not changing water, you leave the element(s) that the dinos need depleted, thereby making it harder for them to grow.

Keep in mind that's just the theory. We don't know exactly why stopping water changes works in some dino cases. We just know that in some cases, it does.

jcorndogg · Oct 15, 2020

Echoing others, raising your nutrients should be the first step. That’s more difficult to do if your water changes are exporting the nutrients back out. This also makes maintaining stability more difficult.

Fortunately, I was able to beat my dinos without any chemical intervention. Initially, I tried raising nutrients naturally by feeding more and reducing white light photo period. During that time, I did frequent manual removal with a baster and water changes. After 2 months with no improvement, I changed my approach.
- I eliminated all coral feeding and reduced fish feeding to once every 3 days. On non feeding days, I’d add a small amount of nori.
- Limited basting the rocks to nightly right before the lights went out.
- No water changes
- Raised nutrients by dosing N and P. I saw a reduction of dino growth at .03 and 5 but it took .04 and 10 to really eliminate them.
I believe dosing N/P was the key to my success. My fish didn’t suffer at all with the reduced feeding.

NeonRabbit221B · Oct 15, 2020

If you have been fighting dinos as long as I have you wouldn't advise a WC. Every time I did they would creep back up. I stopped dosing trace elements as well.

brandon429 · Oct 15, 2020

I disagree with it, we specifically do full water changes to battle them in the sand rinse thread

expands in pattern out to fifty pages of nothing but 100% water changes and dinos were not caused in any system, the big change cleaning either beat dinos or it didn’t, more times it did

usually we battle cyano which is easy to beat with rinsing for the most part, those big cleanings never caused dinos in any case. The link between water changes and dinos is not established in all approaches, it’s key for the no water change approach.

try and find one active pico reef with a dinos invasion on any forum, there’s a specific reason only large tankers get dinos.

zachj7 · Oct 15, 2020

Good info all, thanks. My Dino problem (ostreopsis ID via microscope) isn't that bad, it's not really getting worse or better for a couple months now. I have to get up close and look at things to see the the brown strings here and there. So visually seems fine, except that they really like to form the strings on my leather corals, causing them to close up and create/shed that protective covering all the time. LPS in general aren't really bothered by them.

Got here probably because my nitrates have been undetectable for a long time, so I have been dosing nitrate and have been keeping at 3ppm for a couple weeks. Phosphates have always been ok, hovering around the 0.05ppm mark.

Maybe i need to slowly work up to 10ppm nitrate and try holding off on water changes (usually i do 15% every 2 weeks) and see how that goes.

taricha · Oct 16, 2020

NeonRabbit221B said:
If you have been fighting dinos as long as I have you wouldn't advise a WC. Every time I did they would creep back up.

This is the repeated observation. Dinos bloom, reach some population and level out. Water change, and they increase again.

chipmunkofdoom2 said:
The prevailing theory is that dinoflagellates use some trace or minor element in seawater to grow. Eventually they will deplete the element and their growth will be slowed. If you perform a water change, you are replenishing the trace elements that the dinoflagellates need to grow.

And this is the theory to explain it.

@andrewey showed that a stable population of dinos was Fe-limited, by adding Fe and re-triggering growth vs a control. (I don't have the link handy)

That said, it's obvious that stopping all water changes doesn't fix anything, but it may be helpful temporarily.
Elevate PO4 & NO3. Let other things compete. If the situation stagnates, then definitely restart water changes.
More dinos will grow, but so will other things, and export the dinos and keep pushing things in that direction. (Also UV works so well on ostreopsis, it's almost cheating)

Brandon's advice also works, but is a whole different ballgame and the concepts aren't (IMO) mix-able. (I.E. Don't RIP clean, do 100% WC and elevate nutrients.)

zachj7 · Oct 17, 2020

I've considered UV, but it's a a sizable investment (cost and physical size) that would be needed for my 180g. I do see a UV sale going on today....maybe i should go for it. Seems pretty clear cut that UV would be very effective against what i have.

UV sterilizers usually have seperate recommended flow rates, a high flow range and a low flow range for different functions. What flow range is effective against these dinos? Slower or faster?