Dinoflagellates.

Dfee said:
Why do we think coralline recedes and turns white? Alk, mag, and ca all good. Dino's not necessarily on the parts that turn white
Click to expand...

Calcification often stops in corals and they lose their color. Same goes for coralline.
Why this happens has not been proven yet but I find these causes to be likely:

Coralline repels dinos with their chemical defenses. If you place dry rock on top of the coralline, dinos will settle there.

The toxic soup can get to leathal levels. At lower levels I don't find it odd that life struggles.
I've had light gray M capricornis and elephant skin looking pale gray for months. You would swear they were dead. Same goes for the coralline. It's pale gray, not white and still alive.

Beneficial bacteria is kept down by the dinos.
 
Dfee said:
Why do we think coralline recedes and turns white? Alk, mag, and ca all good. Dino's not necessarily on the parts that turn white
Click to expand...
Yes, that's a really good question. It must be able to inhibit other organisms ability to uptake calcium, in my case after a year my doser was dialed back from 72ml/d ca, 62ml/d alk and 30ml/d mag to 30ml/d ca, 20ml/d alk and 0 ml/d mag and my mag got over 1500ppm. Coraline algae was receding and turning white and the couple sps corals I have weren't growing much.
 
Dfee said:
Why do we think coralline recedes and turns white? Alk, mag, and ca all good. Dino's not necessarily on the parts that turn white
Click to expand...

Mine's doing that too. Dinos cause weird alk swings in my tank, the worse they get, the wider the swings. Ca and Mg are fine in my tank. Just a guess.

hth
ivy
 
Drive by updates as I'm still house and garden sitting. There's nothing like garden veggies is there?

I misunderstood the Montireef protocol and had been saving skimmate in a jar (from various people). I put 30mL of it in Mon and today, anyway. No reaction.

Stirred up a small area of lumpy sand to see if anything dire happened. Interestingly the lumps are back today. Cygni must be right about it being bacterial.

Something I'm doing may be very bad:
Slightly panicky because I'm getting that ominous yellow haze from the sandbed up about 5cm. Previously that's been the warning sign for a massive dino bloom. It's covered with pods.

Ivy
 
Billybatz9 said:
What kind of pods
Click to expand...

any will do (IMHO) the point is to add as much "new" life as possible. i used:
indo pacific sea: worms, pods, stars, etc.
reef to go:pods
algae barn: pods and phyto

i also added a few more fish from the LFS in Silverdale WA (which required more feeding of the fish), that combined with drier skimmate i think produced more "food" and out competed the dinos...

it worked for me (and i did try UltraX which didnt do anything for me)
 
My urchins ate everything when I had dinos. My snails died but my urchins trudged on.

Ancient creatures designed to survive ancient enemies?
 
DNA said:
Saturday morning I started to add the content of my skimmer back to the tank after having sat there for a week.
I drained the wet part from the skimmer in 3 doses 3 hours apart to make sure it was not too much of a shock to the fish.
I can't say I like the smell of sulfur in the morning, but it didn't seem to have any effect on the fishes.

The skimmer was turned off and the water turned slightly less transparent with the 0.4gallon (1.5 litres) of skimate back in there.
I scraped the glass as well to add to the mix and added a bag of GAC to a high flow area.

Last night the dinos took off the sand bed for their nightly swim in the water column and today right after the lights come on they all returned so it looks identical to how it did yesterday.

If something happens in the next few days or not, you will be the first to know.
Click to expand...


The results are in.
After 5 days the dinos are just going on with their daily lives as usual.
If fact I've got slightly more of them right now than last 12 months.

This means we can't say that recycled skimmate will help with a dino problem.
We also can't say it's useless until several others try this out.
 
12 weeks since I considered myself dino free, just finished putting samples of skimmate and sock collectings under the microscope and absolutely 0 dinos to be found, just lots of plankton that I never saw while I had dinos.
Wish I had looked at samples before I had dinos.
Bubble algae still disappearing to.:cool:
 
Day 3 adding week-old skimmate collected in a jar back to my tank.

Good news: Got here this morning and Whoah! 90% of the cyano is gone!

Bad news: big dino outbreak, I see the harder brown circular spots on the glass and some have developed strings since yesterday morning. Hermit crab is ok. Corals ok except for my hammer which sucked all its polyps in and looks very cranky.

hypothesis: dinos survive better in a jar than other bacteria? Or they consumed the bacteria. If I'm just re-culturing dinos this won't do much good. Really need to buy a decent microscope. Should also see if I can get a big cup of skimmate from someone who doesn't have dinos.

Dang.

Ivy
 
cal_stir said:
12 weeks since I considered myself dino free, just finished putting samples of skimmate and sock collectings under the microscope and absolutely 0 dinos to be found, just lots of plankton that I never saw while I had dinos.
Wish I had looked at samples before I had dinos.
Bubble algae still disappearing to.:cool:
Click to expand...

That's a milestone alright.
It further strengthens what we have been saying about plankton and bio diversity.
There is no doubt we are going places in this thread.

If you could in a single post go through your case.
The type of dinos you had, how it affected your tank and what you did to correct the situation.

Something short, but enough for others to follow.
 
DNA said:
The results are in.
After 5 days the dinos are just going on with their daily lives as usual.
If fact I've got slightly more of them right now than last 12 months.

This means we can't say that recycled skimmate will help with a dino problem.
We also can't say it's useless until several others try this out.
Click to expand...

I think we might be just culturing our own dinos, they probably get sucked into the skimmer and survive quite happily. Why'd it work for Monti and Cal? Maybe the predatory bacteria just aren't there in our tanks while they have them. Skimmate from someone else's tank would be interesting to try.


Ivy
 
Quiet_Ivy said:
I think we might be just culturing our own dinos, they probably get sucked into the skimmer and survive quite happily. Why'd it work for Monti and Cal? Maybe the predatory bacteria just aren't there in our tanks while they have them. Skimmate from someone else's tank would be interesting to try.


Ivy
Click to expand...
I never put skimmate back into the tank.
 
DNA said:
That's a milestone alright.
It further strengthens what we have been saying about plankton and bio diversity.
There is no doubt we are going places in this thread.

If you could in a single post go through your case.
The type of dinos you had, how it affected your tank and what you did to correct the situation.

Something short, but enough for others to follow.
Click to expand...
I tried to sum it all up in post 1589.
 
Here are two pics of the front of my glass through dirty glass (sorry).

Looks to be some green algae showing up and I think diatoms.

3d371eb3ad70731a1bc13338bc36d26f.jpg


df7c7e857ebeea46fc4f573fe57326df.jpg
 
karimwassef said:
My urchins ate everything when I had dinos. My snails died but my urchins trudged on.

Ancient creatures designed to survive ancient enemies?
Click to expand...

Funny, I added an urchin when I added my new fish a few weeks ago and it's almost destroyed everything any algae I've had on my rocks and back wall.

Wait til it finds my front glass.
 
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