Algae id

[baronen]

This algae started when I was out of town for two weeks and had my dad feeding the fish. Tanks is two months old at this point.

 

is this cyano?

[A.m.P]

I think you've got dinoflagellates, suck some out, mix them up in a daisy-cup and stick it in a windowsill. If they goop back up you've got Dino's.

Otherwise it could be dozens of different types of hair-algae or cyano and I'll leave it to those whom are better versed to ID it.

[baronen]

47 minutes ago, Amphrites said:

I think you've got dinoflagellates, suck some out, mix them up in a daisy-cup and stick it in a windowsill. If they goop back up you've got Dino's.

Otherwise it could be dozens of different types of hair-algae or cyano and I'll leave it to those whom are better versed to ID it.

yeah from pics on the internet it looks pretty similar to dinos, but it doesn't have any air bubbles, and the strings are way longer than anything ive seen 

 

when you siphon it up it comes out in chunks and then grows back in strings like the next day. 

[A.m.P]

If it's coming back that fast it's probably dinos, potentially some of the weirder forms of hairy-cyano you see on the back walls of some tanks.

Calothryx

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/dinoflagellates-–-are-you-tired-of-battling-altogether.293318/

[baronen]

Ill try the test tomorrow and see if it clumps up. 

 

I read that forum post, thanks. It seems like dino shows up under stress. I had bryopsis and had to dose fluconazole, and then had to leave my tank for 2 weeks like a week later, so my tank was left with fluconazole and no water changes for three weeks. This was certainly the cause.

 

Not sure how to proceed but ill probably start with a blackout

[baronen]

So ive been dealing with this since my last post. I've thought it to be dinos this entire time. Never used a scope to confirm though. Ive done blackout, vibrant, increased WC, no WC, H2o2 and nothing has worked. It'll go away and then reappear. FIrst as a rust colored dusting that looks identical to diatoms, then it will start to form a mat and thicken up a little, then it will start to form stringy threads. If left undisturbed, it will eventually cover the whole sandbed.  It doesn't really bubble though at all.  Maybe one or two bubbles will be on the sand bed.

 

Another thing is it ONLY forms on the sand bed, not on the rockwork or anything else. If sand gets pushed around into the rockwork it will grow on the sand in the rocks, but never anywhere else. Most people seem to have dinos that grow one everything.

 

Im currently dosing dino x, and it now appears to be more textbook cyano. It has that purplish color. There is still some "rust" on the sandbed though.

 

Anybody else want to chime in here for an ID. Nothing appears to be working. I have one more dose of dino x. After tonights dose I am gonna dose h2o2 for 3 days with a blackout of my tank. If its still there I think Im gonna tear the tank down this has become the opposite of fun. Everything but the fish and a porcelain crab is in a hospital tank.

 

Would new sand help? its a small tank so itd be an easy change. what about chemiclean? has this been cyano all along? 

 

EDIT: would post a new pic but theres really not much to see because of my recent removal/low light

[A.m.P]

Have your Nitrate and Phosphate levels continued to be low or zero all this time? If so it could definitely be dino's, otherwise it also looks and behaves kind of like a weird cyano too... I know I'm kind of repeating what I said before, but it doesn't seem like there's that much more to go on either =/ Sorry I can't be of more assistance.

[baronen]

I'll update this if anyone else goes through a similar looking algae. It appears it was cyano and dino. The feathery strands were cyano and the brown patches were dino. School picked up and I pretty much let the tank go, was literally 1 weekend from tearing it down. I got a bropsis outbreak (AGAIN!) as well and the tank was a complete mess. Dinos were literally all you could see on the rocks. I dosed flucanozole to remove the bryopsis. It did the trick and I then gave the dinos one last shot with an oversized UV sterilizer. After two weeks, all that remained was a brownish mat. I've done three big WCs to get the paramters stabilized after all that crazyness. Lights are running normally and all I see is normal healthy algae growth. Even the micro critters are coming back!

 

Also, I'd recommend not dosing fluconazole for bryopsis. I believe this is what caused the dinos in the first place back in october. I believe it really affected my relatively new micro diversity, creating an opening for dinos to takeover. I only dosed it again because it didnt hurt my livestock and I had nothing to lose