Really considering

[monkeyCmonkeyDo]

Dinos are smaller than diatom. You can do this or that and out compete them.
You can id them and that will help... lol
Or u can just fix it or try and prevent it as said.
Yes they eat silicates or ciliates or however u spell it.
U can wiki dinoflagellates. Lol. Ecology and habitat section.
My tank suffered both planaria red flat worms at dino same time.
Why break the tank down? Do you see the fts?
d

 

[monkeyCmonkeyDo]

And*

 

[Jilly92]

What do you have for flow? How bigs your display? I would stop doing wcs and do wcs more spread out with rodi water. No silicate.
D

I had 2 of these powerheads and had to take one out because they're so strong. 55 gal. I already spread my waterchanges out to like once a month and top off twice a month.

 

[Jilly92]

Increase flow and filtration to avoid it becoming a problem if any.
D

Ya I do need to add some carbon. I don't think flow is issue.

 

[Jilly92]

Many people dose silicates to their display to fight dinos to help diatoms to grow. Diatoms are short lived and not as much of a nuisance.

I swear I thought I had diatoms for a week all over the glass, everyday a film. But I didn't see them under the microscope.

 

[Jilly92]

Dont dose anything. Looks beautiful.
D

Thank you, but thats starting to change really quickly lol

 

[Jilly92]

Many people dose silicates to their display to fight dinos to help diatoms to grow. Diatoms are short lived and not as much of a nuisance.

And silicates are in tap

 

[Jilly92]

Dinos are smaller than diatom. You can do this or that and out compete them.
You can id them and that will help... lol
Or u can just fix it or try and prevent it as said.
Yes they eat silicates or ciliates or however u spell it.
U can wiki dinoflagellates. Lol. Ecology and habitat section.
My tank suffered both planaria red flat worms at dino same time.
Why break the tank down? Do you see the fts?
d

It's ostreopsis, I checked last night

 

[ScottR]

And silicates are in tap

Unless you test your tap, you don’t know exactly what’s in it and how much. Silicate dosing is fine but you want to control how much you put in if you go that route. The problem with tap water is that as you evaporate water out, and put more water in, many elements, metals and other chemicals can accumulate. Tap water probably won’t kill any tank or give you problems short term but longterm you may face other problems and not know why. There are some good dino threads on here about how to tackle them. It’s not an easy job to do and takes time. But you did the best thing and get a microscope ID on them. That’s the first thing to do. Then learn how to treat that specific type of dinos.

And yep that’s ostreopsis. I won’t give advice on how to treat because everyone has a different take on them. UV being one of the most commonly used tools. Ostreopsis will let up off the rock after lights out and be free living in the water so the idea is that a blackout will help because the UV will kill them in that stage. My take on dinos is always to grow some kind of an algae on the rocks to compete with dinos. To do this, you want to make sure you have enough nutrients (PO4 and NO3) to be able to grow just enough algae. Dinos are basically the end of the line. When nothing else wants to grow, they jump in. You can have zero nutrients and the cleanest water and all dinos want is light.

 

[Jilly92]

Unless you test your tap, you don’t know exactly what’s in it and how much. Silicate dosing is fine but you want to control how much you put in if you go that route. The problem with tap water is that as you evaporate water out, and put more water in, many elements, metals and other chemicals can accumulate. Tap water probably won’t kill any tank or give you problems short term but longterm you may face other problems and not know why. There are some good dino threads on here about how to tackle them. It’s not an easy job to do and takes time. But you did the best thing and get a microscope ID on them. That’s the first thing to do. Then learn how to treat that specific type of dinos.

And yep that’s ostreopsis. I won’t give advice on how to treat because everyone has a different take on them. UV being one of the most commonly used tools. Ostreopsis will let up off the rock after lights out and be free living in the water so the idea is that a blackout will help because the UV will kill them in that stage. My take on dinos is always to grow some kind of an algae on the rocks to compete with dinos. To do this, you want to make sure you have enough nutrients (PO4 and NO3) to be able to grow just enough algae. Dinos are basically the end of the line. When nothing else wants to grow, they jump in. You can have zero nutrients and the cleanest water and all dinos want is light.

I've been using a uv sterilizer every night 12 hrs, but it wasn't enough wattage I was told. My rocks are covered pretty good in algae. I didn't know they were only photosynthetic. I'm a little scared to do blackout because that's when my tank crashed and lost so much coral and livestock and $$$. I wasn't running carbon at that time though so that's one place I effed up, maybe the carbon would've absorbed those toxins when they died off.

 

[Jilly92]

I've been using a uv sterilizer every night 12 hrs, but it wasn't enough wattage I was told. My rocks are covered pretty good in algae. I didn't know they were only photosynthetic. I'm a little scared to do blackout because that's when my tank crashed and lost so much coral and livestock and $$$. I wasn't running carbon at that time though so that's one place I effed up, maybe the carbon would've absorbed those toxins when they died off.

 

[Idoc]

Definitely Ostreopsis dinos...nice microscope pics!

I mainly had small cell amphidinium dinos, but then once those were cleared using the Elegant Corals treatment method, I did have an outbreak of Ostreopsis that took over for awhile. Your UV (3w) is way too small for your tank size...it might work to control some algae, but not strong enough to remove the dinos. UV worked to clear up my ostreopsis in 3-5 days and I have not had them return. I use a 57w Aqua UV on a 75g tank pushing only 350-400gph through it...and that is a bit overkill on UV size (but I got a great deal on it locally from another reefer). A 25w would have been sufficient. You want to plumb the UV so it pulls from the display tank and returns back into the display tank.

@ScottR said, ostreopsis go into the water column in the dark more easily than other dinos. A blackout is usually sufficient to pull the ostreopsis into the water column where the UV will knock them more quickly. Carbon should be run at the same time since ostreopsis are toxic as they die off.

Dosing nutrients to maintain 5-10ppm NO3 and 0.10ppm PO4 are helpful to allow other algaes to take hold while fighting dinos. Many recently have been showing great success with dosing live phyto and copepods as well in order to increase biodiversity in the tanks.

 

[Timfish]

Well, this system uses tapwarter and this system use tapwater fitered through GAC and this one uses water from a water softener so I'm obviously not adverse to using tapwater but you should check your localwater utility to see their reports of waht's in your tapwater. If you have't looked at it yet you should look at AquaBiomics article on live rock. In my mainteneance business I'll only use water changes and manual removal for any nuisance algae. It's all I've found is needed to shift the equilibrium of a reef ecosystem so it favors corals over algae, Forest Rohwer discusses this in his book "Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas".

 

[Jilly92]

Unless you test your tap, you don’t know exactly what’s in it and how much. Silicate dosing is fine but you want to control how much you put in if you go that route. The problem with tap water is that as you evaporate water out, and put more water in, many elements, metals and other chemicals can accumulate. Tap water probably won’t kill any tank or give you problems short term but longterm you may face other problems and not know why. There are some good dino threads on here about how to tackle them. It’s not an easy job to do and takes time. But you did the best thing and get a microscope ID on them. That’s the first thing to do. Then learn how to treat that specific type of dinos.

And yep that’s ostreopsis. I won’t give advice on how to treat because everyone has a different take on them. UV being one of the most commonly used tools. Ostreopsis will let up off the rock after lights out and be free living in the water so the idea is that a blackout will help because the UV will kill them in that stage. My take on dinos is always to grow some kind of an algae on the rocks to compete with dinos. To do this, you want to make sure you have enough nutrients (PO4 and NO3) to be able to grow just enough algae. Dinos are basically the end of the line. When nothing else wants to grow, they jump in. You can have zero nutrients and the cleanest water and all dinos want is light.

Definitely Ostreopsis dinos...nice microscope pics!

I mainly had small cell amphidinium dinos, but then once those were cleared using the Elegant Corals treatment method, I did have an outbreak of Ostreopsis that took over for awhile. Your UV (3w) is way too small for your tank size...it might work to control some algae, but not strong enough to remove the dinos. UV worked to clear up my ostreopsis in 3-5 days and I have not had them return. I use a 57w Aqua UV on a 75g tank pushing only 350-400gph through it...and that is a bit overkill on UV size (but I got a great deal on it locally from another reefer). A 25w would have been sufficient. You want to plumb the UV so it pulls from the display tank and returns back into the display tank.

@ScottR said, ostreopsis go into the water column in the dark more easily than other dinos. A blackout is usually sufficient to pull the ostreopsis into the water column where the UV will knock them more quickly. Carbon should be run at the same time since ostreopsis are toxic as they die off.

Dosing nutrients to maintain 5-10ppm NO3 and 0.10ppm PO4 are helpful to allow other algaes to take hold while fighting dinos. Many recently have been showing great success with dosing live phyto and copepods as well in order to increase biodiversity in the tanks.

I have soo many copepods. I have phytofeast but I left it out of the fridge and I'm not sure if it's good anymore. So ya I do need to get another uv sterilizer!

 

[Jilly92]

Well, this system uses tapwarter and this system use tapwater fitered through GAC and this one uses water from a water softener so I'm obviously not adverse to using tapwater but you should check your localwater utility to see their reports of waht's in your tapwater. If you have't looked at it yet you should look at AquaBiomics article on live rock. In my mainteneance business I'll only use water changes and manual removal for any nuisance algae. It's all I've found is needed to shift the equilibrium of a reef ecosystem so it favors corals over algae, Forest Rohwer discusses this in his book "Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas".

Good info thank you!

 

[Jilly92]

Definitely Ostreopsis dinos...nice microscope pics!

I mainly had small cell amphidinium dinos, but then once those were cleared using the Elegant Corals treatment method, I did have an outbreak of Ostreopsis that took over for awhile. Your UV (3w) is way too small for your tank size...it might work to control some algae, but not strong enough to remove the dinos. UV worked to clear up my ostreopsis in 3-5 days and I have not had them return. I use a 57w Aqua UV on a 75g tank pushing only 350-400gph through it...and that is a bit overkill on UV size (but I got a great deal on it locally from another reefer). A 25w would have been sufficient. You want to plumb the UV so it pulls from the display tank and returns back into the display tank.

@ScottR said, ostreopsis go into the water column in the dark more easily than other dinos. A blackout is usually sufficient to pull the ostreopsis into the water column where the UV will knock them more quickly. Carbon should be run at the same time since ostreopsis are toxic as they die off.

Dosing nutrients to maintain 5-10ppm NO3 and 0.10ppm PO4 are helpful to allow other algaes to take hold while fighting dinos. Many recently have been showing great success with dosing live phyto and copepods as well in order to increase biodiversity in the tanks.

Whats elegant coral treatment? I took my elegance out of frag tank last night because Haitian anemone wants to fight it. I put it into main tank and it's definitely not liking the change.

 

[Idoc]

Whats elegant coral treatment? I took my elegance out of frag tank last night because Haitian anemone wants to fight it. I put it into main tank and it's definitely not liking the change.

Look up Elegant Corals Dino/Cyano Treatment plan. There used to be an R2R threat on it. It uses microbubbles with bacterial additions and carbon dosing (vodka) with a 7 day treatment plan. Worked well to clean my system up... and i had tried everything with dino treatments!

 

[Jilly92]

Look up Elegant Corals Dino/Cyano Treatment plan. There used to be an R2R threat on it. It uses microbubbles with bacterial additions and carbon dosing (vodka) with a 7 day treatment plan. Worked well to clean my system up... and i had tried everything with dino treatments!

Hmm I have read ppl using vodka a bunch. I will have to look into it, thank you!

 

[DaddyFish]

I have soo many copepods. I have phytofeast but I left it out of the fridge and I'm not sure if it's good anymore. So ya I do need to get another uv sterilizer!

General guideline for UV is 1-watt per 10 gph flow, and enough flow to turnover tank 2-3 times per hour.
*** Coming back for edit...
Found your tank size, 55-gal right?
I would recommend an 18-watt UV, running at 110-180 gph.

 

[Idoc]

Hmm I have read ppl using vodka a bunch. I will have to look into it, thank you!

Vodka is used as a source when carbon dosing to reduce nutrients in a system. It is just used in the Elegant Corals technique to increase a food source for the other bacteria that are introduced into the system to basically clean the tank out. The technique worked for me...but it is very specific on the steps to perform and pH must be monitored very, very closely during the treatment.