New Poll: treating problem dinoflagellates with high pH

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I am putting together an article on treating problem dinoflagellates with high pH and want to gather some information on the success that folks have had with this method.

Please only answer in the positive if you are fairly confident that you have or have had dinoflagellates, and not diatoms, cyanobacteria, green algae, or other problems. I know it can be hard to distinguish these, but the poll will be more useful if the incidence of comments on similar organisms (like cyano) is a small portion of the total.

These pest dinoflagellates are usually a snotty, gooey coating on things. They can be clear/white, or green to brown. They also often trap O2 bubbles during photosynthesis.

Thanks in advance.


PS: Here's a related poll discussing the initial incidence of dinos depending on tank pH:

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=942412

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Comments about how long your treatments lasted would also be useful, whether they were a success or a failure. TIA

 

[boxfishpooalot]

what if you dont want to treat for them because they are not problematic yet? Or Basically im keeping them under controll with macroalgae.

I just got a small 1" patch in my sump, but they dont spread. What would i put for that?

 

[Zoom]

Here what i did so far to try to kill the dino's.
I siphon them out weekly with a water change .
I brush them off the rocks/tank every night and trap most of them in a filter sock in the sump by running my Tunzes at max flow .
I drip kalk two times a day about two gallons in the morning and two gallons at night at very concentrated amounts with a drip bucket.
I use large amounts of carbon in a magnum 350 filter changing it every three days for three weeks.
I pump up my ORP to 350 MV from 300 Mv now for only three days so far .
I usually run the ozone to 25 MGPH now 50 MGPH.
So far i'm gaining some ground but they still there .
MY ph is about 8.2-8.4 it will go up to 8.7 when i drip Kalk . I have the windows at the house open now , better PH.



Here is My reef system.
200 gallon tank 90% SPS 50 Gallon sump with build in Refuge I grow cheato in reverse day light with a 6.7K 65W PC light over the top.
I have Deltec 601 calcium reactor .
Deltec AP902 large skimmer with a ozone .
I run 1 Liter of Rowa in a deltec reactor.
AS for light three 250W 10K xm with two 96W PC 420-460- .
The dino's kill all my snails so far and it stop my corals from growing I did lost about 10 small SPS to STN.
All my fish are not infected by them so far..

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I'll add a line just for you, box.

 

[Travis L. Stevens]

Mine came and went with tank age.

 

[mike68]

i tryed raising ph to 8.5 for a week did little for the dinos after some time my anemones seemed a little stressed so i went back to 8.2 or so.

the best thing i did was add mechanical filtration and clean daily. add carbon and clean rock daily. after about a month they seemed to die off. these things are very frustrating almost made me give up.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

You might actually need to raise the pH higher than 8.5 if you want to see a quick result, but hopefully more folks will chime in.

 

[boxfishpooalot]

No sticky for this one?

Thanks for adding that line

 

[old salty]

Do they look anything like this?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I'm not an expert in identifying it, but it may well be. Does it seem snotty when you push something through it?

 

[raddogz]

Randy - I treated with chemi-clean and turned off the lights for three and a half days. The last half of the third day I did a ten gallon water change and had the lights on for a couple of hours.

Each subsequent day I slowly increased the photo-period.

By the fifth or sixth day I did another five gallon water change.

Skimmer was running and I believe I was running carbon as well after the chemi-clean treatment. All of this took place in my 58g tank.

 

[piercho]

My tank tends to run low levels of alk. All I use to buffer is limewater. At one time I did have dino snot balls up to the size of a quarter showing here and there, sometimes appearing in the branches of Pocs, sometimes just on the rock. Spiking vinegar at 2 Tbls/gal was coincident with a the disappearence of the dinos. But stopping spiking wasn't coincident with a return of dinos.

I was under the impression boosting carbonate alk was the "standard" treatment for dinos?

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

I was under the impression boosting carbonate alk was the "standard" treatment for dinos?

I think elevated pH and reduced nutrients is a lot more common.

 

[shullat]

Going through a bad case of it now, and have so far cleaned the sand bed with a vacuum, shut down the calcium reactor, dripping kalkwasser on the top off unit to elevate my ph from 8.1 to 8.5. I have also added mechanical filtration with carbon and will reduce the photoperiod for a couple of days. Hope all of this does something. Very very frustrating, already lost five acros and zoos and anemone are all closed up.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

The folks in my forum that recently saw some immediate effects from elevated pH were pushing it it much higher than pH 8.5:

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=939928