My fight with dinos
The Start
As I mentioned before I have started with dry rocks and it comes with a price. Lack of biodiversity. The buzzword even new reefers are aware of and no doubt it is paying a big part of the Dino problems we hear about a lot in R2R.
I have had (sill till a certain degree have) my fair share of dinos . I would love to know what has triggered it but I only have assumption as I was doing a lot of things at the time of it has started.
The first signs a naive aquarists easily ignore. I had only light dusting on the glass and the edge of the sand. Watching BRS videos I assumed this was diatoms and expected for a new reef. Not to mention I have used tap water for the first few weeks. My RO unit has just arrived at the time so I have ignored it.
It was June and the problem hasn’t yet escalated too much or at least didn’t show that much as one of the thing Dinos really like is light and light was not present in high the volume than since the lighting unit I have ordered was delayed. The freshwater lights came with the tank were not enough for a full bloom. I didn’t know what kind of surprise is lurking in the shallow waters. It didn’t have JAWS but it has bit hard later in August.
In August I have decided it is time for more biodiversity so introduced Rotifers and Copepods not knowing it could feed Dinos when there is a die off of the population. And there was die offs as I wasn’t feeding them and the available algae would not able to keep up the amount introduced.
I have also dosed vibrant thinking more bacteria is the better.
Then at the end of the month the lights arrived and few days later the bloom started in full force the sand turned brown. Nitrate soon hit 0 and. Phosphate fallowed it soon. It has happened in the matter of days. Sill naively choose to ignore it as it may go away itself. Well it didn’t.
I only had a suspicion that it might be the “you know what” because it was looking better in the morning than at the end of the light peak.
I have started go trough the Dino tread’s 600 pages and soon realised it is not the question if I have Dinos but which type I have. And to my first post on the tread got a short answer: get a microscope! Now I think it was one of the best advise I have ever got. It is more important equipment than a fishnet.
So I have ordered one which turned out to be useless and than an another one was good enough for taking a picture trough my phone to ID it.
I have found out I not only have to deal with the “D” word but with the “A” too. Later stands for Amphidinium and I had small and large cell ones. Yay.
The main problem with these ones that they don’t tend to swim much staying on and under the sand mainly and resistant to Dino X and other chemicals.
This one seems to be so tricky to get rid of it had its own tread in R2R with people expecting with different techniques to get rid of them.
The plan
.
Since it is long winded to explain all the whys I will just list what my plan was below;
- increase nitrates (food grade Saltpetre)
- Increase phosphates (KH2PO4)
- Stop water changes
- Get a UV
- Dose silicates (Brightwell Sponge Excel)
- Do manual removal as much as possible (filter floss and vacuuming)
- Increase biodiversity (add adding live rock and mod)
It meant to order a bunch of stuff, wait for deliveries and tell my wife you have to be patient. Now that’s not in her nature. She is a do it now type of woman.
It took more than a month by the time everything were together so I have started to do the things as they arrived.
Started to dose phosphate and nitrate. In the beginning it was gone almost instantly. The amount of 20-40ppm of nitrate gone in less than 24 hours in the first few days. Phosphate was dosed to 2ppm daily and gone by next day. In the fist few days I started to question my maths but than without significant transition I could stop dosing these. After in next 2 months I had to top up maybe twice the nitrates.
Nitrate seemed to be out of control and sometimes hit over 40-50ppm than disappeared soon after. Probably more was going on in the microscopic level than what I could understand.
The UV has been plumbed from and to the display fashion (required for more efficient operation) I could see an affect within a week. This was targeting the small cell Amphidinium
I have bought from the LFS some Miracle Mud® and 2 fist size live rock and put it in the tank. Apart from some sponges and Coraline Algae growing on them not much visible happened at first but nitrates started to stabilise and maybe the water seemed to be cleaner. I say maybe because at this point I was desperate to find something positive.
I have also employed some chaeto in the display over the worst affected areas. I didn’t see real positive affect of this but thought it worth a shot as some people had success with it. My Scopas tang was eating most of it and it started to disappear soon. What it did do though it introduced some critters namely micro brittle stars.
I had a filter floss hanging in high flow areas to manual collection of dinos. Worked really well to export Dinos but my wife wasn’t impressed with it. I had to go into long uncomfortable conversations on how soon I will remove it.
Started to siphon the top of the sand without really disturbing it trough a 5 micron filter sock. This gave the illusion of clean sand for about a day or two.
The beak trough
All above made a difference in its on way but the battle seemed to be never ending and clean sand to be just a dream. Due to the conditions in cyano started to appear too.
But than finally the silicates have arrived. The product I was going for wasn’t easy to get hold of in the UK. Everywhere the stock was back ordered.
Measuring silicates is hard and tests are unreliable so I decided not to order yet another test kit but calculate the dosage by simply doing the mats. 2ppm was the target to achieve diatoms to bloom. So I have just dumped it in in 2 days. Diatom meant to kill my large cell Amphidinium.
Within 3 days I had the diatoms bloom and within a week I couldn’t found dinos.
2 weeks later cemyclean got rid of the cyano and after months I had clear sand and rocks.
The fight is not over though. I had a small relapse of dinos in some small patches so as of today I have to started dosing silicates again. I possibly won’t go as high with the dose this time but we will see how it goes in a week or two.
I have restarted water changes.
Ever since I try to tell everyone to get a microscope and use it to ID their algae as part of their routine. I feel it is more important than have low level nitrate and phosphate.
My corals by the way really enjoyed the elevated nitrate and phosphate levels and the silicates made the water so crisp that for days I was just couldn’t talk about anything else but that.
I have also came across a video I want to share with you. So much to learn from it;
The 2 dino tread are a must to read
This thread is a spin-off from the @mcarroll very successful Dino thread The purpose is to discuss methods for removal and fighting against a particular strain of dinoflagellate - Large Cell Amphidinium. It seems to make up about a third of the cases of dinos. The reason this strain gets its...
www.reef2reef.com
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/dinoflagellates-–-are-you-tired-of-battling-altogether.293318/
Finally I want to say special thank you for those people helped me the most in this fight.
@ScottB @taricha
The worst state of the tank can be seen in the attached picture for your amusement and hoping this will give hope for those think their brown uglies are bad.
