Lighting and algae?

[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.

[asylumdown]

hmmm, I actually just noticed that you're in Abbotsford. Do you use RO/DI water?

The reason I ask is because the hydrogeology department at the UofC is down the hall from my office and I used their lab for a bunch of the soil testing I did for my thesis. I've become pretty good friends with one of the PhD students in the department and his whole project is on the very serious issue Abbotsford has with ground water contamination from agricultural activity. There's a gigantic aquifer that straddles the Canadian/US border that I'm pretty sure all of Abbotsford draws its drinking water from and at the highest levels of the aquifer (the top few metres) nitrate concentrations are truly insane. Drinking water is drawn from deeper down, but the nitrate plume extends all the way down just in decreasing concentration. Canadian regulations won't allow anything higher than 10ppm nitrate reported as N (AKA 44.5ish ppm nitrate, it's a dumb way to report concentrations) in drinking water, so I'm pretty sure Abbotsford has to bring in water from other sources to dilute the nitrate to within legal limits.

Because it straddles the border and so many American communities that are also drawing from the aquifer, there's a joint international task force presently trying to figure out how to deal with the problem (http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wsd/plan_pr...s/absumas.html). I'm not 100% clear on how municipal water supplies are directly affected by it, but if I lived in Abbotsford I'd definitely want to say very on top of my RO/DI maintenance as the levels of nitrate in your tap water are probably way higher than is acceptable for a reef tank, and also likely fluctuate a lot.

Just another avenue to explore anyway.

[Slyguy00]

Thats quite interesting. And now that you mention it i havw tested
My tapwater with my tds meter and it is between 210-230 give or take. I do use ro water but i have yet to get a di unit. After the ro though its coming out at about 7. That totally explains why the ppms are so high out here. Thanks for the info!

[asylumdown]

You might want to invest in good nitrate test kit if you don't already have one. Test both your tap water and the output of your RO system. I'd also test your stored RO water.

If you're adding nitrate directly to your tank, it could explain the dino explosion.

ETA: and I thought Calgary's TDS was high but I never test more than 140 on my meter

[Slyguy00]

I don't have a good nitrate or nitrite test right now just a crappy nutrafin. I use salifert for the big 3 though. Would you suggest getting a salifert nitrate kit or a hanah checker? I am actually curious to know an accurate nitrate reading coming out of ro. The water must be bad though because iv only ran about 100-150 gallons of water through my ro and already the sediment filter is turning brown.

[asylumdown]

I didn't know Hanna had a nitrate checker. I'm lazy so if I could choose between a handheld checker and a test kit that relied on me matching a colour wheel I'd probably pick the hanna device lol.

I use the Red Sea nitrate test kit because it uses the same reagents as the Hach machine that I use at school (which really shouldn't go down the drain but there's not much you can do about that), but I'm gonna try and find me the hanna one now!

[Slyguy00]

Im not posative hanah has a nitrate checker or not. I just thought i remembered seeing one.