Lighting and algae?

[Slyguy00]

i messed with the powerheads last night and the flow is pretty intense. And I'm working on doing a massive water change… AGAIN. hope it helps. but so far nothing seems to.

[reefwars]

Could be dinos hard to diagnose though


H202 will help if done correctly

[asylumdown]

do they get tiny bubbles in them by the end of the day? If they're brown and stringy to me it sounds like dinoflagellates but you'd need to confirm that with a microscope.

There's a bajillion different kinds of dinos, some are horrific, toxic, poisonous and just generally awful - think red tides and shellfish not suitable for human consumption, and some are just unsightly and darn persistent but otherwise seemingly harmless. Hard to know which one you've got, but if all of a sudden all your slime eating snails like Astreas suddenly kack it en mass there's a good chance you've got one of the less friendly kinds.

I also wouldn't be so quick to link it to the lights. They can happen regardless of your lighting system and are known to occur in tanks lit by pretty much every kind of technology in the trade.

ETA just re-red your initial post and you said they do in fact get bubbles. That to me sounds like dinos. The most obvious time to look for them is on your rocks at the end of the day right before lights out. If you look at an oblique angle you might see a fine layer of microbubbles covering your rocks. Classic symptom of dinos

[Slyguy00]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

do they get tiny bubbles in them by the end of the day? If they're brown and stringy to me it sounds like dinoflagellates but you'd need to confirm that with a microscope.

There's a bajillion different kinds of dinos, some are horrific, toxic, poisonous and just generally awful - think red tides and shellfish not suitable for human consumption, and some are just unsightly and darn persistent but otherwise seemingly harmless. Hard to know which one you've got, but if all of a sudden all your slime eating snails like Astreas suddenly kack it en mass there's a good chance you've got one of the less friendly kinds.

I also wouldn't be so quick to link it to the lights. They can happen regardless of your lighting system and are known to occur in tanks lit by pretty much every kind of technology in the trade.

ETA just re-red your initial post and you said they do in fact get bubbles. That to me sounds like dinos. The most obvious time to look for them is on your rocks at the end of the day right before lights out. If you look at an oblique angle you might see a fine layer of microbubbles covering your rocks. Classic symptom of dinos

Well it deffinately sounds like dinos because you just desribed it exactly. I just finished doing about 50-60% water change so well see if that helps. What would you reccomend i do? Because its driving me crazy. Thank you for your reply. Very helpful!

[asylumdown]

haha, well since I still have them I might be the wrong person to ask. In my case they're not crazy out of control, and I've only ever seen them physically on one coral that I don't really care that much about and they haven't seemed to be impacting anything except how the tank looks (i.e., they're not slowing down the growth of anything, even the one coral they sometimes seem to 'dust'). They wax and wane for no apparent reason as far as I can tell, and sometimes my sand turns brown, and sometimes I can only notice them around the perimeter of my rocks. As a result, I've decided to just live with them because if you do searches online, the kinds of interventions people do to try to completely get rid of them are pretty extreme.

Some of the things people suggest:

1. a complete lights out (as in you cover your entire tank in a blanket so that zero light gets in) for anywhere from 3 to 10 days depending on who you ask.

2. Drastically reduced photoperiods after that

3. Dosing the tank with varying amounts of hydrogen peroxide

4. Raising the pH above 8.4

5. massive water changes

There's an article on advanced aquarist here:http://www.advancedaquarist.com/blog...sons-i-learned where the guy says you basically need to do all of that together to beat them, along with getting your tank's nutrients way down to the super low range and physically removing as many of them as possible, both with a filter sock and via siphon.

There's also a biocide/algicide from Fauna Marin called Ultra Algae X that claims to directly kill dinos along with all sorts of other kinds of algae, but it's instructions are pretty specific and also involve some pretty restrictive things like reduced photoperiods and such.

Since my problem isn't *that* bad, to me the "cures" sound worse than the disease for their potential to throw something else out of whack and I've been content to just live with them as I'm really the only one who notices them. I have definitely noticed a correlation (which may just be an accident and not causative) between how often I change my filter socks and how brown my sand gets as the day goes on. It's just speculative, but I've looked at mine under a microscope and those stringy strands are actually made up of some highly motile little dudes. I think at night they disassociate and enter the water column to some degree, which is why it seems better in the morning. Theoretically a small enough micron filter sock might help.

Heres a couple pics of a 'strand' the a clipped out of my tank under the scope (I have a terrible scope camera so the picture quality is pretty bad):



And a short video of them in motion. The 'strand' literally disintegrated into a mass of this:


If you find a solution that doesn't involve injecting my tank with highly reactive chemicals, messing with the pH, dosing it with some unknown poison, or stripping the water of nutrients to the point where my corals stop growing, please, let me know.

[Slyguy00]

That is unreal! your video and pics of the dinos is crazy! Thank you for all the info, that is super helpful. At least now I know what it is and can look into it way more. I deff don't wonna black out my tank, and I have already been trying to starve it out, and have reduced my photo period to 6 hours which kinda sucks lol. Is there any specific reason or cause that creates this stuff?
Anywayz thanks again, awesome information. This site is a goldmine!

[asylumdown]

Nutrients don't help, but other than that I'm not really sure. Nutrients might explain why some tanks get hit like a bus and others just sort of limp along with it, but I'm not sure if nutrients are always the explanation for their absolute presence or absence.

I don't know much about dinoflagellate biology, they're a pretty diverse group of organisms so I suspect that some strains are accidentally pretty well adapted to living in aquariums the same way that aiptasia accidentally have the perfect suite of adaptations to make them a perfect aquarium pest. Some of the reason might simply be that you were unlucky enough to have introduced these guys on a coral frag at some point whereas this particular species wasn't in your tank before. But that's only a guess.