long standing dinoflagellate bloom

[hallison]

My husband and I have set up what we hoped would be a lovely reef aquarium. It has been running for about 6 months now. We maintain rasonable water quality (Po4=-, Amm.=0, No2=0, No3=10-12 ppm, pH 8.45-8.2/24hr, alk 3 meq/L, Ca 420-440, temp= 25.5C) Our system is 65 UK gal (~80 US gal). We use a Deltec AP600 protein skimmer, lighting 400w 10,000K MH and 2 50w blue actinics on an 8 and 10 hours daily cycle, respectively. 2.5 months ago we had a few mushroom anemones begin to close up and our LFS suggeste4d that our iodine levesl were low. We bought a test kit and started adding the Kent iodine. I added the stuff daily waiting for the expected level to be reached. It never happened, but we did get a "lovely" hair algae bloom . So we added RowaPhos to our sump and stopped dosing with iodine. Low and behold, the hair algae stopped growing and began dying back. Unfortunately, a snottly looking brown film began covering everything in the tank....especially where the hair algae had been. This film grew thicker over the next week and each day it would die back at the end of the photoperiod.

We began to panick...some of our fish began behaving erradicaly. We have confimed microscopically that this stuff is due to dinoflagellates. However....how to fix it....

We have continued with our protein skimming, added charcoal and poly filter. We've turned the light off for 2 days (it was gone when we turned the lihts back on....but returned in another 24 hours. We bought a redox probe....first reading 110 (after leaving porbe in tank 24 hours)....retested the probe in the standards...it was correct. We bought an ozoniser and ae running it thorugh our protein skimmer (50mg/L), we have gradually brought our redox up to 350 (during the night....still falls during the day) but the stuff has not succombed.

We have been loaned a UV streriliser and are going to try that for one week and will also dose our take with live cultures of nonchloropsodis (hoping that they will consume any nutrients left in our tank).

Does anyone have any succesffull experience with dealing with these blooms? We've lost 4 of our 7 fish (2 goral gobies and 2 blue cheeked gobies) and our Midas Blenney is not healthy now, 2 pin cushion sea urchins, and a fes soft corals.

Can anyone out there help?

 

[liquid]

I killed the lights on day 1, did a 33% waterchange. I did 33% waterchanges every 2-3 days. Turned the light back on on day 3 for a 5 hour photoperiod. I did at least six 33% waterchanges every 2-3 days and then quit. Dino's were gone and haven't come back yet and it's been 1 month. I should note that when I did my waterchanges I took a powerhead and blew out the rock and the surface of the sandbed and tried to syphon as much of the suspended detritus as possible.

I, too, lost a fair amount with that dino bloom. I lost some killer orange R.florida from that crap.

hth

Shane

 

[Anonymous]

I've been fighting since..... well, a long long time.
First of all, here's a decent article on them (I think the only one out there)
http://www.reefs.org/library/article/t_crail.html

Here's some things I've tried and have seemed to work:
1. Bigger cleanup crew--worked well until most of the crew perished (I fed the crew nori when the algae started getting scarce), then they came back

2. Upgraded my skimmer and planted a bunch of macroalgae - This seems to have the biggest long-term impact. I also have a massive outbreak of botrocladia (red bubble macroalgae) that I am fighting plus stringy hydroids.

3. Aggressive waterchanges and a 72 hour lights out--this knocked the algae flat, but they came back within 2 months.

4. Hucked all my old fish food and bought new/different stuff--not sure if this had any effect.

5. Stopped B-Ionic for a while--no help.

In general, dino's seem to do especially well right after a waterchange for some reason. They don't do as well in high flow areas. Right now they are still present, but not dominating as they used to. The more work I put into the tank, the less of a presence the dino's have (but I put a ton of work into this little tank). Your iodine observation is identical to my experience with using it (now, not using it). I'm not a big fan of chemical solutions, but if there's one made for this cause, let me know. I have not intentionally played with pH.

Tank is 19 months old, 37 gallons, 4"DSB/40lbs LR/BakPak2R, RO/DI for last 12 months, DI for the initial 6 months. B-Ionic (25ml/day in the morning) since the beginning.
Cleanup crew is currently 6-8 big turbo's and a handfull of red/blue hermits
pH 8.3, NO3<5ppm, PO4<0.03ppm, alk 2.5-4.0meq/l, Ca 400ppm, T=81F, SG=1.025
To my knowledge, no misc metallic objects are in the tank.
Unexplained deaths: 2 fish, 2 emerald crabs, 15+ snails
I dump the skimmer cup 2-3 times a week and pull out any chunk of dino's big enough to grab--a daily chore.
RO/DI functions at <1ppm TDS, <0.03ppm PO4 as of last week.


Motivation is tough these days with all the pests in my tank that multiply in spite of my efforts--but who knows. I'll hang in there and keep looking for new angles to the problem. Somehwhere in the equation of Stuff In - Stuff Out is the answer.

Ty

 

[Anonymous]

Found a good threads at RC:
http://www.reefcentral.com/vbulletin/sh ... ight=dinos

 

[Anonymous]

I'm 99% sure my dino bloom started when I let my RO membrane go too long without replacement. I used the same membrane for about 18 months, then I began to notice the dinos. I go t a new membrane and began the battle in Feb 2002.
I have just begun to see success in July.
Took weekly 20% water changes, first blasting the dinos with a powerhead, and using a HOT Magnum with carbon 24/7. Also paid more attention to pH levels and Calcium. Kept them where they should be.
I lost all my snails, all hermits, and 3 different sallylightfoot crabs. I cam darn close to losing my M. capricornis, and A. millepora/. My other SPS corals were looking cruddy, as was my frogspawn.
I still have dinos, just they're not out of control. Wish there was a product I could add to get rid of them without harming anything else. What a PITA!
BTW; my dino bloom all started with thick dark green bubbly mats growing in low flow areas. Then the bubble-strings got everywhere.
I hate those freakin' things!

 

[SteveP]

The changes I made to my routine when I got a dino bloom were to reduce my actinics to 8 hrs a day and my MH's to 6 hrs a day. I was a little stingy with feeding the corals, but maintained my feeding for my fish. I added some macroalgae and a grow light to my sump, and yanked out as much of the dinos by hand as I could every 2-3 days. I took about 4 months for it to go away. It's been about 3 months sine I've seen it.

Now I have cyano. {sigh}

Steve
8{I

 

[hallison]

I want to thank you all for your experiences. I'd like to aks you some more questions, The dimensions of our tank ar 42 inches (yes, that's an odd size)x 18 inches x 24 inches. We have 2 Eheim 1060's returing water from our 36x12x18 sump (which runs half full. We have pairs of Maxijets 500's (at the top) 750's in the middle and 1000's at the bottom of the tank for water cirulations in staggered times of 10 minutes on to 5 minutes off. We felt that this would give us really good water movement in the tank. If people feel that water movement is an issue.......would you expect dinoflagellates in a system like this?

We empty of Deltec AP600 skimmer every 24 hours (usually it is fairly empty) currently with the probelm we might have to empty it 2x a day and it is positively filled with thick dark green/black opaque Cr*p. Normally we have been feeding our tank everyother day either a 1 cm sqared peice of frozen marine mix of about 30-40 flakes of Aquarian marine flake. I have recently changed (in the past week) to feeding the thank every other day with about half the amount of flake food.

We have 2, 8 year old Percula Clowns (had them since they were very young) and one Midas Blenney (3.5-4" long). We possess a 1 foot sqaured peice of white bubble coral, green heliofungatis actinoformic, a 4 inch sqared acropora, an 8inch sqared peice of pusling xenia, a few mushroom anemones, a 4 inch clam, 2 green serpent stars, 12 red-legged hermit crabs, and black nudibranch, 10 turbo snails, 2 cleaner shrimps and 1 peppermint shrimp, we are loosing some yellow polyps and a lareg finger coral to the dinoflagellatesm and have lost a large Ritteri anemone (from turing the lights off....was stable and happy for 5 months ate well, moved and caught itself in a power head in the dark) a large (8 inche sqared peice of clove polyps, 2 full-grown ble cheek gobies, a small golden eyed tang, 2 grenn striped coral gobies, 2 pic cushioned sea urchins).

We cant' figure out how this started.....

We have an unusually strong MH (400W at 10,000K)......other people who have had this.....is there an associated with light strength?

Does anyone understand what gets them started?

 

[MiNdErAsR]

Heather,
The course of action (if memory serves) that worked for me (outlined in The Reef Aquarium Vol.1 Delbeek & Sprung) goes as follows:

1. No lighting of any kind (close those window shades!) for 36-48 hours, then reduced photoperiod (2-4 hours) until bloom subsides.

2. Maintain an elevated pH level (8.3 to 8.4) both day and night during the entire time you follow step 1. This is not easy, but can be done via kalkwasser or B-Ionic.

In my case total time to erradication was approximately one week. However, it seems this remedy works for some but not all. I think almost all marine aquarists will experience this nastiness sooner or later. Good luck.

HTH