I cant seem to catch a break

[m0jjen]

So my tank is a complete disaster. Since the start in february its been uphill. The tank started out great and everything went way over my expectations until i 0'ed out my phosphate. Since then i've had dinos and couldnt shake em.

I've tried to Kno3 + kh2po4 dosing for get 10 ppm no3 and 0.1 po4. Which actually worked, my dinoflagellates ostreopsis died and vanished and got replaced with hairalge and green cyano (yay). since then i let the nutrients sink to normal levels.

The green cyano is still here thriving, not a single sight of algae and some new dinos have appeared. The cell size is about 1/100 of ostreopsis and is immobile under a microscope. Meanwhile i got AEFW and had to break down all my acros and QT. which has been done, im flatworm free (**** ye).

Frags and whatnot has started to encrust and grow, everything is nice and dandy until 4 days ago when i started losing acro after acro each day. They litterly die over night. The only thing i changed was tune the skimmer slightly, no major improvement, just abit dryer and added 300 ml of carbon to a 500L system, so roughly 1/2 recommended dose.

I feed really heavy but still cant seem to keep nutrients up without dosing inorganic kno3 and kh2po4.

All my parameters are stable:

Salinity 1.025
Ca: 450
Mg: 1410
Kh: 8.15
No3: 5
Po4: 0.02
Temp 25.5c

Fishlist:
Sixline
Clownfish
Salarias
Hawkfish
Regal angel
Watchman goby
Purple tang
Powderblue tang
4x Lyretail Anthias
Purple Firefish

13 fishes in total.

I feed formula one and two pellets along with frozen mysis.

Filtration is done by roughlt 55 lbs LR (i know its low), a nyos quantum 160 and a really small fuge in the ATO of the reefer 425xl. Nothing more.

So what can i do really? I have about 55 lbs fresh cycled LR in a bin waiting for my new tank that ill get when we move in february, would it be a good idea to put all right in the tank now just to provide with new bacteria and fauna?

Any tips?

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

You're carbon dosing?

 

[m0jjen]

You're carbon dosing?

Nope, havent been since i zeroed out the phosphate.

I dont dose anything at all atm beside the effluent from my calcium reactor.

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

300 ml of carbon to a 500L system, so roughly 1/2 recommended dose.

Got it.
I thought this was a reference to carbon dosing.


I can't for the life of me figure out how you are burning thoug N/p like that.
I have a 55 with a lolt more rock and two DSB. And not as many fish . It's way easy to feed too much.

Now although the numbers appear stable , it sounds like the tank has had ups and downs. But I really don't know the timeline.

No the rock will likely just eat more nutrients. And if you have color actively dying I wouldn't add antying really on that scale.

My self, id scale back to just the basics of tank husbandry and the Kiss method. Maybe introduce another food with more fats.

The green cyano should pass, it may flare a bit with the higher food in the system, but I'd doubt that.

 

[m0jjen]

Got it.
I thought this was a reference to carbon dosing.


I can't for the life of me figure out how you are burning thoug N/p like that.
I have a 55 with a lolt more rock and two DSB. And not as many fish . It's way easy to feed too much.

Now although the numbers appear stable , it sounds like the tank has had ups and downs. But I really don't know the timeline.

No the rock will likely just eat more nutrients. And if you have color actively dying I wouldn't add antying really on that scale.

My self, id scale back to just the basics of tank husbandry and the Kiss method. Maybe introduce another food with more fats.

The green cyano should pass, it may flare a bit with the higher food in the system, but I'd doubt that.

Should have said GAC The problem is that it wont get more KISS than having a calcium reactor, 10% WC and feed twice a day :/

Well i had a huge dino outbreak suffocating the whole tank more or less so i doubt theres much microfauna left at all. And at the moment i dont have any algae at all. Just bacteria. Which probably is taking a toll on the acros, im guessing if i can get algae to grow ill be fine pretty much

 

[Scorpius]

How old is the tank and did you start with dry rock?

 

[m0jjen]

How old is the tank and did you start with dry rock?

The tank is started in february 2017. The live rock has been in 3 tanks of mine for 4 years, same LR in all tanks and its live rock, not dry

 

[m0jjen]

No ideas? Acrtos started to STN/RTN bottoms up now and all in all im lost. Parameters are good, skimmer preforming, not overfeeding. Been doing some WC to try to stop it without any results.

 

[Rakie]

Okay, you mentioned a whole bunch of stuff but what are the problems you have right now?

From what I read, you have cyano, and your dinos are coming back. Let me know if I missed something.

On dinos -- Dinos suck. They can be the end of your reef, and the end of the hobby for some. I had dinos for 6 months. The thing I can tell you for sure is they will continue to come back the MOMENT you stop fighting them. You cannot stop fighting them until they've been gone a LONG, LONG time.

Why? Because dinos will form a cyst to basically 'weather out' the storm of disruption you give them by trying to kill 'em out. They will wait you out. They can lie dormant for upwards of 6 years. Years.

As little as blowing them off the rockwork will cause them to create these cysts to wait you out.

To beat dinos -- You have to throw the sink at them. Doing one thing may help, but wont fix it. I had to literally do everything I could think of, for months... To get them to go.

So here's what I did, this was done ALL at once, never ever slacking for even a single day...
- Use filter socks, change them out 2-3x per day, wash with bleach
- Blow off as much as you can, manually scoop out (can cause cysts)
- Run Carbon aggressively unless you opt for metronidazole
- Remove dead CUC
- DO NOT DO ANY WATER CHANGES (absolutely crucial, water changes fuel dinos like crazy)
- Switch salt brands (if they're strengthened by water changes, they love your salt. Change the salt, it helps sometimes -- Doesn't matter what you're using, if you use the same stuff you're just powering the dinos).

If using Metronidazole
- Metronidazole WILL kill some species of Dinos -- It worked for me, but would not work alone, I still needed every step here except carbon because carbon would strip the medication from the water..

How long did it take -- Six months. A daily battle. Nothing was making a difference until I opted for Metro, which took them out in days. After giving it a week on metro, I blew off everything, did a water change, ran Carbon heavily and skimmed heavily, then off with the skimmer and carbon and another dose of Metro (I knew a WC would cause a dino explosion).

I used metro for a month straight, doing a water change once a week backed up with blowing off the rocks, skimming wet, and running carbon. Only to get back to metro after a few hours. Otherwise the dinos will reestablish overnight like you never even scratched them.

Dinos are no joke. Sometimes they don't just go away naturally, sometimes carbon alone won't fix it.

Read my build thread (in signature) to see how bad I had it at one point.

 

[m0jjen]

The dinos is a minor concern at the moment thank god. Its mainly the cyano beeing everywhere and the lack of any normal algae thats concerning me the most. Havnt scraped the glas for a good 2 months now and its still flawless, meaning algae dont thrive.

 

[Rakie]

Dinos are the main concern at all times in my experience !!! Don't let them sneak up on ya. I can't stress enough, 6 months of daily work to get rid of 'em, I wish that on nobody!

But, cyano isn't so bad. I'd gladly take cyano over a lot of other issues.

You note that you have no good algaes in your tank, and that your dinos and cyano took over when your phosphate hit 0. This is common. Dinos and cyano are very simple organisms, and when the tank is limited in phosphates it's very easy for a simple organism like that to take over. Some people have beat their dinos and cyano by dosing phosphates and nitrates.

It's my firmly held belief that a large amount of issues in our hobby stem from the utter lack of nutrients. They cause corals to struggle to survive and pale, and they allow bad organisms to take over unhindered. The algae is what's keeping the dinos, cyano, and other bad organisms at bay.

So for me, I would introduce more phosphates. 0.02 in a young system is very low. The people who scream low nutrients are the only answer have two things in common; Large and OLD systems.

You don't need a mature reef to be successful, but the chemistry of a mature reef is insanely different than that of a young one.

 

[m0jjen]

Dinos are the main concern at all times in my experience !!! Don't let them sneak up on ya. I can't stress enough, 6 months of daily work to get rid of 'em, I wish that on nobody!

But, cyano isn't so bad. I'd gladly take cyano over a lot of other issues.

You note that you have no good algaes in your tank, and that your dinos and cyano took over when your phosphate hit 0. This is common. Dinos and cyano are very simple organisms, and when the tank is limited in phosphates it's very easy for a simple organism like that to take over. Some people have beat their dinos and cyano by dosing phosphates and nitrates.

It's my firmly held belief that a large amount of issues in our hobby stem from the utter lack of nutrients. They cause corals to struggle to survive and pale, and they allow bad organisms to take over unhindered. The algae is what's keeping the dinos, cyano, and other bad organisms at bay.

So for me, I would introduce more phosphates. 0.02 in a young system is very low. The people who scream low nutrients are the only answer have two things in common; Large and OLD systems.

You don't need a mature reef to be successful, but the chemistry of a mature reef is insanely different than that of a young one.

Let me rephrase myself Dino is very much a concern. It wiped the whole tank more or less when i started it, since then i upped the nutrients to 10 ppm no3 and 0.1 ppm po4 and removed the sand, life is fine. Then came the cyano and took over the whole tank, i wsa thinking this is okay. Cyano i can manage. Which has been fine. But not my corals are dying out the blue. Im not sure the brown stuff i have is dino. The cells are 1/20 of a ostreopsis cell and they are not active when watching in a x600 microscope.

I also share the belief that luw nutrients are a trend causing alot of problems along with all the fancy bottles out there.

I've tried to get my nutrients up by removing about 10-15 lbs of live rock, 3 litres of siporax and any filter media i've ever used to go K.I.S.S with skimmer and LR as only filtration. I dose nothing besides the calcium reactor, which keeps everything in line nicely.

I also got alot more fish and are up to 13 fish which i feed two to three times daily with pellets and frozen food. This is an increase of 5 fish from when i started having problems. I also dose KH2PO4 / KNO3 to stop my nutrients from hitting zero.

 

[dmunyon8]

You should take some pictures of your setup, include pictures of acros and the sump! Pictures are worth a thousand words!

 

[shred5]

I had fought dino's for for like 5 years probably around 20 or 25 years ago or so... They were so bad I could go to work and come home to the entire top of the tank being solid dinos. I could scoop them out by the pounds with a fine net.
They seemed to be hitting everyone in the hobby at the time in my area, there were very few of us really that many years ago. I had been in the hobby for many years and never a issue up-till then.


When I first got into the hobby it was common to grow Caulerpa in a reef and we used trickle filters and carbon and nothing fancy originally.
Soon after I started using a skimmer and removing algae they started. When I started using phosphate removing compounds they got worse. More water changes they got worse. Removed sandbed and they got worse. I had got to the point where there were so little nutrients in the reef corals were having a a hard time, back then it was mostly softies.

I started noticing things though.. I set up clownfish broodstock tanks and let algae grow in them like caulerpa to help with the heavy feedings and these tanks had no dinos, matter of fact I could add dinos and they would go away. I started to notice people in the area who did not have dinos had a hair algae problem. I never had them before until we learned to really lower nutrients and I no longer had caulerpa in the tank.

So what did I do I added a fuge with different kinds algae but in order to do this I had to raise nutrients. nutrients were just to low to grow caulerpa. After this I never had a issue again. So basically dino's can suck every last nutrient out of the water and live in water with less nutrients than other green algae. With higher nutrients there is something in the water other green algae can out compete the dino's for. So stop fighting nutrients and fight them with algae filter or a fuge with different algae in them.

I had wrote a article long time ago on this and I know it is out there somewhere because I get pm's on it from time to time. I had worked with John Tullock, Bob Goemans and a few letters with Julian Sprung and that is where some of these techniques came from that you hear of from time to time. Julian published the letters from me and his advice like raising PH with calcium hydroxide which is still repeated today but I found out this did little..

Why do some have super low nutrients and no issues and others do have dino's. Well what ever that is that green algae can out compete dinos for is most likely not in their water. So this theory has came up.
One thing in the article I did and I still get pms from time to time is I used things to remove heavy metals. The area I live in the water is very high in iron and some of us feel this may be what fueled dinos, it may or not be iron. There are things out there that remove heavy metals from the water and they also seem to work for some. I still live in the area and do not have issues anymore and I run polyfilters. There is also SeaChem's CupriSorb, some have reported success with them. Two little fishies MetaSorb may work too I just do not know anyone who has tried it. So some people feel it may be iron or something else these medias remove that dinos need. It has worked for some and may be worth a try.

This may work with these metal removing compounds but algae as a filter to remove nutrients does work. Yuo do not want crazy high nutrients though because then there is enough to ago around for algae and you have a real mess. Just enough to grow caulerpa in a fuge or enough one of the many algae filters work. I am not sure cheato is enough to do it alone though, it is not as fast of a grower but it may work..

I have not seen a dino in 20 years at least.

 

[m0jjen]

So this is some pictures of it all.

Diplay and fragtank connected and sharing sump:

Sump

Dying acro

 

[Tautog]

FWIW, I too had this problem with Acros dying. My tank was about 1 1/2 yrs old, most corals were growing, but Acros, not all, were dying from STN/RTN. My parameters were fine, with No3’s on the high end, but still had losses. Then, my 2- part consumption increased from 50 ml/ day to 100 to 150 to 200 ml/ day, which is the present level. This all happened over the last 6-7 months, and coral growth on most is very noticeable. The only thing different, I’m feeding more regularly. I’ve let my tank get dirty, removing debris once a week, and WC’s every 2 weeks, 10-20%.
Only other thing, STOP chasing all the numbers, concentrate on Alkalinity, I did, and everything fell into place. Oh, stop using all the chemicals, go the natural way, I used NoPox, but killed the valuable bacteria as well as the bad.
I do everything manually, everything, so you don’t need all that fancy stuff. Without the extras, I feel you can become more in tune with your system. Yep, we’re married, the tank and I, can’t leave her for more than a few days, but it’s working.

 

[Servillius]

Nope, havent been since i zeroed out the phosphate.

I dont dose anything at all atm beside the effluent from my calcium reactor.

What are your current nutrient tests. All the talk of having nutrients too low lately has caused folks to forget nutrients were what killed off sps in all our tanks years ago.

I’d need more pics to even offer an opinion of what’s wrong but I think you should keep at keeping nutrients down.

Dino is a huge pain. I recommend at least 3 Days total lights out followed by at least 2 weeks of less than 4 hours of low intensity light. I also recommend restarting the protocol immediately if you see even a hint of brown wispy matter.

Best way to destinguish if it’s dino is with a microscope. Second best is to turn off all water movement, wait 5 minutes, and see if the brown slime starts moving about. Look very closely.

Killing dino will lead to algae and killing algae can lead to dino. Focus on the nutrients.

 

[m0jjen]

Only messurement i usually take is KH which i aim to keep at 8. Rest i messure weekly just for the sake of it more or less. I feed twice daily. Pellets by feeder and frozen around 18:00

 

[Servillius]

Only messurement i usually take is KH which i aim to keep at 8. Rest i messure weekly just for the sake of it more or less. I feed twice daily. Pellets by feeder and frozen around 18:00

It took me a while to realize in the first two years of a tanks life it’s entirely possible to have too much nutrient and 0 readings at the same time. Your rock and algae are sucking it up. The problem is it’s very available there for unsightly algae and it’s still saturating your corals. The most likely cause of acro death in a tank less that two years old is, total guess plus a little experience, nutrient excess.

 

[m0jjen]

What are your current nutrient tests. All the talk of having nutrients too low lately has caused folks to forget nutrients were what killed off sps in all our tanks years ago.

I’d need more pics to even offer an opinion of what’s wrong but I think you should keep at keeping nutrients down.

Dino is a huge pain. I recommend at least 3 Days total lights out followed by at least 2 weeks of less than 4 hours of low intensity light. I also recommend restarting the protocol immediately if you see even a hint of brown wispy matter.

Best way to destinguish if it’s dino is with a microscope. Second best is to turn off all water movement, wait 5 minutes, and see if the brown slime starts moving about. Look very closely.

Killing dino will lead to algae and killing algae can lead to dino. Focus on the nutrients.

Current messurements or means of testing them? Salifert NO3 and Hanna ULR. The dinos arent really present anymore and havent been for quite some time actually. But then again, they went away before and came back once sand was introduced.

I have a microscope actually. The brown stuff i have now (old picture from afew months back) is these really small cells.


You can compare the small dots to the ostreopsis cells (larger brown cells). ostreopsis is no longer present but those small cells are. They are inactive and dont move at all under a scope. This image is taken under 600x magnification.