Peroxide saves my Tank! With pics to Prove It!

[metrokat]

do you mean not immune and the peroxide melted them! or it didn't kill the algae?

Palys are immune to peroxide. Palys are alive and well after being injected.

 

Palythoas.

[brandon429]

Great feedback

 

I don't think we had direct observation info on them so far will note that

[metrokat]

Yup. So far I've tried peroxide and also vinegar injection, and they are still alive. I'm goingt to try lemon juice next.

[sean151]

Just finished reading this in about 4 days. I started working with the peroxide on Sunday by dipping my easiest to grab rock in a weak solution (note: I have bryopsis and gelidium everywhere). The bryopsis showed some yellowing, but I think it was too weak to get at all of it. So I went and dipped all my frags, rocks and even a snail. Swished the rocks in the old water and plopped the frags back into the tank straight from the mixture. For the rocks I applied directly to the algae and left dry for a few minutes, but the frags I dabbled a few mL on and then put in a diluted solution. I'm trying to keep my chaeto from dying off so I'm minimizing it's exposure, but allowing peroxide to reside in the tank water due to it's better resilience.

 

I neglected this tank for about a year only doing the occasional wc and calc/alk/mag doses. This should bring it back after some rocks I bought were filled with bryopsis and phos so I couldn't stop it from taking over.

[brandon429]

Pls try to grab pics real quick so we will have a documentation!

[sean151]

Pls try to grab pics real quick so we will have a documentation!

Slightly ahead of you. Will report verbals and will add some pictures after it starts to change.

[brandon429]

quick update: poster on another forum in June documented the technique of submerged spot injection w pumps off, for the times when we don't want to remove rocks or any water from the tank. This is a concentration method that is preferable to simply dosing the whole tank, where both non targets and targets get the same concentration of h202

 

using the submerged spot treatment method, and taking into consideration any tank inhabitants that may be sensitive from the lists we've developed, its a very simple method. The application tool is a pipette that costs about 3 cents

 

http://www.utmas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2487

[Joe Pusdesris]

Another set of pictures. I did not see any mushroom division with this treatment. It didn't kill the xenia, but the xenia seems a lot less happy than the previous treatment.

 

Before:

From Neglect

After:

From Neglect

3 days after:

From Neglect

Edited August 30, 2012 by Joe Pusdesris

[brandon429]

Wonder what happens if you spot treat a group of flatworms with it

[Joe Pusdesris]

They die. Not much of a reason to do it when you can just wash, siphon, or chemically treat them.

[metrokat]

Update on my friends tank: it has been about 3+ weeks since a total undiluted peroxide dip on the rocks. He reports the rocks are still clean. HE scraped the back wall with a razor blade of GHA but that is coming back. We were unable to apply treatment to the back wall back when the tank was worked on with peroxide.

 

He might be getting a sea hare or an urchin to deal with the back wall. alternatively if he has plenty of water I might suggest moving the livestock with tank water to buckets, draining the tank till only the sand is wet, razoring the back wall again and applying undiluted peroxide to it. Learning from past experience, if he does not have enough water on hand to do a 100% water change, this will not be attempted.

 

 

Is that an urchin I see in the back? If yes, did it not eat the GHA?

[Joe Pusdesris]

Is that an urchin I see in the back? If yes, did it not eat the GHA?

 

 

 

 

Yes, they like hair algae quite a lot, and they seem to live forever unlike sea hares which die after they thin the algae to the point that they starve. I wouldn't recommend them for a tank less than 50 gallons or so though. The one pictured is about the size of a basketball, and the spines hurt.

 

I haven't found a green aglae that they won't eat a least a little of. They will eat small amounts of bubble algae and caulerpa if that is the only thing available. But not as voraciously as they eat hair algae, so that is why you can see in my 'before' picture a short green fuzz. If you zoom in, you can see that this is actually Caulerpa sertularioides, not hair algae. This is because they keep eating it whenever it gets larger than that, but they don't seem to like it enough to scrape the rock for it, so there ends up being a lot of little specs that grow out of the rock.

 

 

Here is the same image with some zoom:

 

From Neglect

[Joe Pusdesris]

Also note that they grow fast. He was the size of a softball 4 months ago.

[Joe Pusdesris]

Also, again. Peroxide seems to be a poor treatment for caulerpa. Here is a close up of hte rock from treatment 1 about a week ago and it is growing back out of the rock. It seems that zebrasoma are still the only proven caulerpa treatment.

 

 

From Neglect

[sean151]

It's been documented in this thread that bryopsis, caulerpa, and bubble algae need multiple doses or a stronger dose.

[Joe Pusdesris]

It's been documented in this thread that bryopsis, caulerpa, and bubble algae need multiple doses or a stronger dose.

 

Ok, I just tried a secondary treatment for that rock. Maybe I will get more mushrooms out of it.

[sean151]

Update:

 

Beginning

 

About a week later after multiple dips and broad doses, along with dead material removal

 

Closeup of some dying spots

 

As you can see it's a long battle I still have ahead of me, but it's thinned and lightened a lot.

[brandon429]

Looks sharp! If you want to speed it up, as in three days to 100% clean, do a single drain and treat

 

With direct contact to 3% from a new bottle each tuft will die with one treatment if you can drain the water level down to expose to the air

 

I catch my old tank water as I drain the tank...then after treatment I refill the tank partially with it, flushing off the treated areas

 

This makes for peroxide water that can quickly be siphoned out and changed with clean saltwater

 

The peroxide is exported, the tanks ion balances are set new again, and dissolved waste is exported

 

 

In three days the algae is dead and the corals are brighter

[sean151]

I only have capacity to do 5 gallons at a time and choose to do 3. I take out around 4-5 usually and put back water from the top of the old seawater bucket to make up for the deficit. When I drain and treat I swish it in that bucket even though I know I will need some of it. It creates a full attack on all the algaes, doing spot and broad treatments.

[brandon429]

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2212596

 

From Rc

An overdose thread with recovery and loss information

[sean151]

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2212596

 

From Rc

An overdose thread with recovery and loss information

I would argue that the overdose was not that much. He seemed more misinformed on how peroxide works in the tank and the initial reactions to coral/bacteria. I can easily do 5mL+ in my 10G and have zero noticeable adverse effects besides trumpet coral looking pissed for a few minutes. I've done 7mL or more before also, but I do believe a few types of coral and fish do react severely to this, but by the time one was to make 50% of their tanks water for a wc it would have begun to be close to normal.

Like it's stated in the beginning of this thread, this is an advanced technique and you can't go around using the upper end of the limit without first trying the lower. There most certainly are a lot of unknowns, but a lot has been cleared up in this thread over the year or so. I'm not saying everyone should go and try .5mL per gallon for tank dosing, but if you have a lot of macro/micro-algae it's going to react quickly and the H2O2 level will lower somewhat quickly.

 

TLDR: Read up on normal(short-term) reactions and doses. Start small, adjust as needed.

[brandon429]

Sean I found that while 1 ml to ten gallons is certainly safe, sometimes it wont kill some invaders like red cyano and diatoms

 

For reefs that had tolerable animals and were getting tank-dosed, the real fun never started till they hit 3 or 4 mls per 10g but I'm sure that's just us getting impatient and wanting faster kills lol

 

Reefmiser burned out his bryopsis with the starting dose its strange cyano needed stronger

 

Just goes to show its likely genetic/metabolic differences among tolerance ranges in targets...I would have guessed the thick bodied bryopsis would be tougher than slimy cyano

 

 

 

if one were to add up all the current dosings across the web on different forums they show neat trends that can no longer be denied even in the face of no formal articles detailing tank/peroxide dynamics:

 

-directly dosing a tank does not have the widescale impact to microbial and benthic communities that pros online predicted. Rock dips might kill pods, but tankwide dosing in a controlled manner doesn't

 

-there are known sensitive species and tolerable species that display consistent results across tanks and variable changes (lysmatas are universally sensitive, stenopus are not for ex) regardless of tank design we can predict with near perfect accuracy which common reef tank organisms work within the 1-4 mls per ten range

 

 

 

It is my scientificanecdote guess that the reason you can dose a whole tank and kill only bryopsis and nothing else isn't that the oxygen molecule targets the algae directly, its that primary producers have the weakest genetic complement for free radical damage, or they lack compensating enzymes like the dismutases and catalases which are found in the majority of in-tank life forms being exposed to the same concentration of oxygen.

 

Perhaps bacteria in the filter bed, one of the toughest communities measured across these peroxide threads, are either protected by biofilms or they have the heredity to take dilutions of peroxide no coral could handle, bacteria are the -most resistant- community in our tanks. Recalling overdose threads, the bacteria don't die/cause a recycle

 

Peroxide is not an effective antibiotic when diluted.

 

 

There is no targeting, its just we got lucky and the things we want to kill happen to dislike minor oxygen changes to the tank

Edited September 14, 2012 by brandon429

[sean151]

Just for clarification, I wasn't saying that peroxide is directly targeting the algae, but that the algae is constantly being touched and breaking up the peroxide before it can really do long lasting damage to the defense mechanisms of other inhabitants (besides those super sensitive). I think we completely are agreeing, but I just worded it incorrectly.

[hannahs]

Wanted to post this as a warning to be careful with cleaner shrimps and this method.

 

I took all my rocks out of my tank, dipped them in a 50/50 mixture of hydrogen peroxide and tank water. Left them in the mixture about 5 minutes. Then I rinsed the rocks off in clean saltwater and put them back in the tank.

 

I never actually put the peroxide in the tank, but my cleaner shrimp died within hours of doing this. I guess even though I rinsed the rocks off, there was still some of the peroxide left on the rocks.

 

So just be very careful using the peroxide with cleaner shrimps. They are very sensitive to it.

I also have a pistol shrimp that was unaffected by the treatment. So it's not all shrimp apparently. All other inverts, fish, and coral are fine.

[brandon429]

Thats a great report thanks Hannahs

 

Sean I agree with you, I say that stuff mainly to timestamp it because in 5 yrs everyone will love peroxide and it wont be so controversial lol

if you read reefcentral chem forum threads on peroxide use, they are universally against it, making the claims Ive countered in the posts...love em though for being snake oil preventers, you try and post bs crap over there and you'll get your head ripped off by master chemists lol, so I tread lightly when disagreeing with them lol im no chemist