Pulling my hair out over dinos

trahelyk · Mar 29, 2016

I'm sort of at my wit's end with a case of dinoflagellates. I'm quite confident in the diagnosis--it sounds like that carpet of tiny bubbles hanging off the tips of stringy snots on the sand are a pretty solid key to identification. But I just can. not. kill. them.

This started after I dosed N03 because my SPS were paling. I've done two blackouts--this last one was a complete blackout with a tarp for 5 days. Concurrently, I've been using saturated kalkwasser in the ATO to try to get the PH up, but this only gets it up to about 8.3. I've also been adding Brightwell PH+ at the maximum dose, to no avail. After the first blackout, the dinos appeared to be gone until I ramped the lights back to their full schedule about a week later. Now I'm about ready to resume normal lighting after the second blackout, and I can already see little spots of dinos coming back. I don't dare dose H202 because I've heard it can take out shrimps--our 3 sexy shrimps are among our favorite residents. What else can I do?

CodyRVA · Mar 30, 2016

When I got dinos, I blacked out my tank. I did 48 hours, no lights, used a huge blanket. I then ran only a single actinic light for 24 hours. I saw a few stragglers coming back, so i killed the lights again for 24 more hours, covered the tank, etc. I ran the single actinic again for 24 hours. When I saw no dinos, I then ramped up to half power for a few days, still nothing, then ramped up to my full lighting schedule. It's important to not feed these boogers from water changes, apparently that makes it worse. I never did anything with PH.

Tahoe61 · Mar 30, 2016

CodyRVA said:
When I got dinos, I blacked out my tank. I did 48 hours, no lights, used a huge blanket. I then ran only a single actinic light for 24 hours. I saw a few stragglers coming back, so i killed the lights again for 24 more hours, covered the tank, etc. I ran the single actinic again for 24 hours. When I saw no dinos, I then ramped up to half power for a few days, still nothing, then ramped up to my full lighting schedule. It's important to not feed these boogers from water changes, apparently that makes it worse. I never did anything with PH.

I did the black out but for 3 days. No water changes either, wc increase the severity of the dino in my tank. I used Kalkawasser to maintain a higher pH. Discontinued all use of Amino Acids or sps targeted foods.
It took roughly 3 weeks after initial black out to see significant improvement. Significant reduction in photoperiod post black out was very important. Every time I would see the development of strings of bubbles lights went off.
I always used a turkey baster to clean the dino off all corals and rocks daily, let the water settle and then clean mechanical filtration.

apex003 · Mar 30, 2016

You might consider taking your sexy shrimp to a friends or the LFS so you can use H2O2. I had dinos bad and a multi step approach was ultimately how I got rid of them, but H2O2 was key.

Over about a week I escalated from 0.1ml/gallon/day to 1ml/gallon H2O2 twice per day. I then bolus dosed 2ml/gallon H2O2 and siphoned out as much of the dinos as I could, which ultimately resulted in a ~50% water change. I pulled all my equipment and soaked them in H2O2 for a couple hours with a good scrub. I then did a 72 hour blackout while also dosing 1ml/gallon twice per day of H2O2. I continued dosing H2O2 for probably another week just to kill any remaining dinos.

Not saying that's the only way obviously, but just sharing what worked for me...

Breakthecycle2 · Mar 30, 2016

Im betting its cyano. Can you post a pic please.

brandon429 · Mar 30, 2016

also, never let 75$ in shrimps hold up $1000+ system fix or you will lose the whole system, if this is dinos pending verif

qt them, hold them outside the tank and attack. you need to consider oversized UV sterilization for your specifics
it has a huge chance of helping, after you clean out all the dinos by hand.

trahelyk · Mar 30, 2016

Thanks for the tips, everybody.

Okay, it sounds like I might be making more progress than I think I am. I've been thinking that since I have to keep going after them I must be doing something wrong. It sounds like the key might be to be persistent and keep killing/siphoning/filtering them as soon as I see a trace. It isn't hopeless, right?

The blackouts seem to be the most dramatically effective tool--a few days takes me from an entirely covered sandbed to sparkly-white again. I might be bringing the lights back too soon. I fear for the fate of my starving SPS, but I only have a small handful of struggling frags anyway. I might be going with softies for a while until I figure this out.

trahelyk · Mar 30, 2016

brandon429 said:
also, never let 75$ in shrimps hold up $1000+ system fix or you will lose the whole system, if this is dinos pending verif

qt them, hold them outside the tank and attack. you need to consider oversized UV sterilization for your specifics
it has a huge chance of helping, after you clean out all the dinos by hand.

It's a good point, and I probably would have removed them by now if I could... but they sort of magically *teleport* when I get near them. My thinking is that if I have to remove the sexy shrimps, I will probably have to tear down the aquascape to get them. If I have to do that, I might as well finish the job, pull out the sand, sterilize everything, and start over (with dry rock this time!). It's a viable last resort.

I'll try to get a photo, but it might be hard right now, since I just finished another blackout and there's only a trace of them, and I'm still not very good with the macro lens. I can say I've spent hours poring over photos of cyano and photos of dinos, and I am quite confident that this is dinos. Other than both being red, I think they look pretty different. But I will try to get a photo.

twilliard · Mar 30, 2016

Be careful with the siphon
This is the easy way to spread them.
Don't stir them up with the end of the siphon to help reduce the spread of this flagellate

brandon429 · Mar 30, 2016

I wouldn't start over, but id access the tank just like that for cleaning and for invader attack. since we can't source restocked frags from equally clean systems, we must have a way to win these battles live time with no system loss. fish vector the dinos on their slime coats, so you'd clean the tank and reuse the same fish and itd be second round. our peroxide threads show some great dino battles, the UV is your hidden ace for sure. few consider it, so more dino tanks are lost.

we collect wins with UV all the time

use one meant for a pond, not a reef tank. this is war. amazon sells them, I hear many shippers allow returns for UV that didn't win the day within the right time frames. nice way to test it out, at least. you must had remove all dinos as tank cleaning work to evaluate any action taken on them...uv, peroxide, dinoxal etc.

You were doing it oppositely, with invader in place and in mass, that's holding you back. no two people agree on how to battle dinos, the best one can do is make cure threads testing ideas. we sure have/.

trahelyk · Mar 30, 2016

twilliard said:
Be careful with the siphon
This is the easy way to spread them.
Don't stir them up with the end of the siphon to help reduce the spread of this flagellate

Okay, that is definitely something I've been doing wrong. Is it better to let them die in place and then just keep changing out the socks every couple days? It seems like most of them end up in the socks.

brandon429 · Mar 30, 2016

you'd have to find a dino cure thread, with that action taken as the cure, to know.

trahelyk · Mar 30, 2016

brandon429 said:
I wouldn't start over, but id access the tank just like that for cleaning and for invader attack. since we can't source restocked frags from equally clean systems, we must have a way to win these battles live time with no system loss. fish vector the dinos on their slime coats, so you'd clean the tank and reuse the same fish and itd be second round. our peroxide threads show some great dino battles, the UV is your hidden ace for sure. few consider it, so more dino tanks are lost.

we collect wins with UV all the time

use one meant for a pond, not a reef tank. this is war. amazon sells them, I hear many shippers allow returns for UV that didn't win the day within the right time frames. nice way to test it out, at least. you must had remove all dinos as tank cleaning work to evaluate any action taken on them...uv, peroxide, dinoxal etc.

You were doing it oppositely, with invader in place and in mass, that's holding you back. no two people agree on how to battle dinos, the best one can do is make cure threads testing ideas. we sure have/.

I've looked at UV sterilizers before, but I got scared away because it sounds like you need a REALLY BIG sterilizer to accomplish anything. When I sized one for my tank, I came up with something that wouldn't fit in the cabinet, let alone in the sump. Thing was huge. But I was looking exclusively at BRS. I'd definitely welcome any specific recommendations on brands/sizes on Amazon. This is a Reefer 350, so that translates to about 75 gallons display and 18 gallons sump.

twilliard · Mar 30, 2016

trahelyk said:
Okay, that is definitely something I've been doing wrong. Is it better to let them die in place and then just keep changing out the socks every couple days? It seems like most of them end up in the socks.

It's better to do slow and easy movements. These guys are small... very small
What you see with the eyes is tens of thousands of these guys

Breakthecycle2 · Mar 30, 2016

I still dont think its dino's. I also asked if you could post a pic please.

trahelyk · Mar 30, 2016

Breakthecycle2 said:
I still dont think its dino's. I also asked if you could post a pic please.

Why do you not think it's dinos?

Breakthecycle2 · Mar 30, 2016

Dino's don't grow on sand in m y experience. The picture below is what I had (not my picture).I swore it was dino's, but it was in fact cyano.

trahelyk · Mar 30, 2016

Breakthecycle2 said:
Dino's don't grow on sand in m y experience. The picture below is what I had (not my picture).I swore it was dino's, but it was in fact cyano.

Hmmm. That *could* be what I have, but I swear my stuff has more bubbles than that. I'll give the macro lens another try. My understanding was that millions of tiny bubbles were the defining characteristic of dinos. Also, my first thought was cyano, but it didn't respond to a pretty dramatic increase in flow. The only thing that seems to touch it is a blackout.