My battle with dinoflagellates

[Llorgon]

Originally Posted by Razor Ramon

strawberry snails your tank is smallish you might only need one of these beasts just put it on the rock you want cleaned ,after mine mine cleaned my tank it lived in my sump for a couple years. But there like a bull in a china store lol
Great value for $7.50

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Damn. Those are huge snails. I would definitely only need one. I am hesitant about adding snails though. I don't have much luck with them.

Originally Posted by MitchM

I've been involved with freshwater ponding for a while and some people there are also having problems with dinoflagellates.
The common theme between fw and sw seems to be aquatic environments where people are trying to micromanage water quality, which usually ends up in an unhealthy and unsustainable aquatic environment.

Our reef keeping hobby is subject to micromanaging by it's nature, so that makes it pretty susceptible to dinoflagellates..

In freshwater ponds, some people are using a copper ionizer which kills off populations of algae. Dinoflagellates increase in population as a result because the main nutrient nitrogen remains.

Local oxidation will temporarily kill off dinos because they are organic, but the long term solution seems to be increasing the diversity of various algae.

I don't feel like I was micromanaging the water quality( I probably was). It is a new tank with only 3 small fish and N&P hit 0 for awhile.

I agree that having more algae helps. I only seem to have hair algae on the rocks and hair algae and some really tough green algae on the glass. It doesn't even scrape off easily. But the algae theory makes sense since making the water "dirty" and increasing algae growth seem to be the most effective way in battling dinos. I got some chaeto from Dash last night. So we will see if that helps things at all.

Right now the sand and glass is dino free and anywhere that gha isn't growing on the rocks is dino free, but there is still some dinos on the gha itself. It's quite annoying.

[Llorgon]

update:

Added some new corals over the last week. Everything seems to be doing pretty well so far. It's nice to finally be able to add corals again!


I also picked up some cheato from Dash and it seems to be doing well so far. I have the refugium light come on opposite the display tank lights.

Still working on getting the gha under control. I added a few more snails including 1 turbo snail and an urchin I got from Frogger. The urchin has finally started to climb on the rocks. Hopefully it will take a liking to the gha.


I have been attaching a toothbrush to my python hose and scrubbing the rocks in the tank while doing water changes which has made a big improvement on the level of gha.

My nitrates seem to have dropped and read 0. Should I bring them up to 5ppm? I assume the 0 reading isn't truly 0 since I have so much algae.

[DKoKoMan]

I wouldn’t bring up anything at this time until you notice the algae in the display to be minimal. With what you have been describing, it is appropriate to assume your nutrient levels are still high.