errand Posted May 5, 2020 Share Posted May 5, 2020 I have a small 30L frag tank which for 6 months was literally full of caulerpa and live rock, and a frag rack; it was pristine clear water, white sand, full of copepods/amphipods, but the caulerpa was taking up too much space. So I ripped it all out, treated the rocks with hydrogen peroxide, and added new dry rock. You can see what was going to happen already :(. Tank minus caulerpa and new dry rock to cycle, about 2 months later and full of acan/zoa frags plus a toadstool, I started getting brown/green algae, but didn't worry too much as there were still thousands of copepods on the glass. I added a little bag with phosphate minus, zeolite stones and carbon to the tiny sump, to try to get rid of the algae. [for this frag tank I have never tested the water, i do 30% water changes weekly [one 10l bucket]. Before I completely upset the tank balance it was a perfect routine.] About a week ago I noticed the brown algae was really dirty and wispy looking, then saw lots of long trailing strands coming up from the sand/frags, full of bubbles. Also the back wall of the tank was covered in slimy looking bubbly crap. I have managed to get a look with my microscope and I'm pretty confident its a dino bloom. I removed the bag of phosphate minus/zeolite, added back new carbon, and have been feeding the tank reef roids to try and fix the problem; I'm getting some chaeto balls delivered too which i'll dump in. The frags all seem to still be fluffy and healthy, which is puzzling, and there are still many many copepods on the glass; I guess I'm after confirmation from the microscope pics, they were taken between 40 and 80x magnification. I've been reading a lot of dino forum threads, and I'm sure I brought this on myself, but hoping to bring the balance back to the tank. I thought these might be ostreopsis dinos? Quote Link to comment
errand Posted May 14, 2020 Author Share Posted May 14, 2020 Ok I'm 10 days in and I think they are gone now! I havent seen anything like this number under the scope in the past 4-5 days. here is what the corals looked like on 6 May, day after these dino pics were taken: You can see I still had so many pods, literally thousands of pods. Here is what I got during the day on my coral frags, long nasty strands of crap: What I did, initially, I sucked out as much of the slimy crap as I could. I then did 3 day dosing of hydrogen peroxide 6% - about a capful twice a day, at lights on and lights off. My toadstool frag was pissed off. My two stylo frags almost overnight bleached out to transclucent white, although they still had all their polyps and the polyps were still green. The zoas and acans didn't mind though. After the 3 days of peroxide - I fed the tank reef roids daily. I added half a litre of copepods at the beginning and about 50ml of phytoplankton a day. I bought a large ball of chaeto and dumped it in the tank, just floating around. I didn't alter the light cycle at all, just kept feeding/adding phyto and more pods. After about 4 days of this, I haven't seen a single dino in the microscope samples, just stringy algae, no nasty little spinning sesame seeds. I haven't seen any of the sticky slimy strings at all. I'm also seeing a light green dusting on some of the rocks [hurrah for normal algae]. The toadstool opened back up, the stylos are still fully white but have massive green polyps and I'm not sad if I lost them to get the tank back into balance. I still have 2L cultures going of pods and phyto, and will keep saturating the tank in this way, and will work out how to contain the chaeto somehow or slowly remove it. I haven't done a water change either, I missed two weeks now since I first noticed the dinos. I'll give it another week on this regime, then do a big vacuum/water change, keep adding the pods and phyto, and see how things go. But the tank looks cured as is now - here's a quick pic [the glass is dirty on the outside a bit, but the sand is clear, the rocks are clear, its like night time and the lights have been on all day, no stringy crap!!] 1 Quote Link to comment
mitten_reef Posted May 14, 2020 Share Posted May 14, 2020 Thank you for posting a detailed follow up, and happy to hear that the tank is on its recovery/has recovered. Quote Link to comment
errand Posted May 19, 2020 Author Share Posted May 19, 2020 So far now there is still no evidence of infestation - I have seen a few strands of brownish algae today with air bubbles in them, but when I sucked them up and look under my microscope, they look nothing like before at all. There are many many different shapes and sizes of critters, and all different colours - lots of fast moving rainbow colored guys, long cigar guys, worm guys, green and blue triangle guys, yellow, red and green round guys, some that look a bit like dinos but bigger and faster. I found one single black sesame seed shaped guy that looked like the dinos from before, but it was more a reddish color and was almost flat. Nothing like seeing thousands of sesame seeds wherever the slide moves and nothing else. I will keep dosing the phyto and adding more pods/rotifers for the next week, the snails are cleaning up the glass busily, corals still look good except for the poor stylo. 1 Quote Link to comment
mcarroll Posted June 11, 2020 Share Posted June 11, 2020 I would take the chaeto out and examine it for dino's....they love to use it as a host and live on it as epiphytes. (Their mostly-harmless mode.) Remove that chaeto and you'll probably remove almost every remaining dino from the tank. (I'd scoop it out with a bucket so no dino's have a chance to release and drop back into the water while you're moving it around.) In a nutshell: No more peroxide. No more dead rock. No more phosphate remover. No more macro algae. No more phobia over nutrient levels. No more associating nutrient levels with pest algae. You can probably scale back the water changes in the long term too....5-10% a week would probably be adequate. Quote Link to comment
errand Posted June 12, 2020 Author Share Posted June 12, 2020 Hey yes I did that already a few weeks ago - and tank is still pristine again and lovely. Lots of ampipods scuttling in the rocks again, many many pods on the glass all the time, no algae except for a few little tufts that the turbo eats up. And yes I have stopped doing such big water changes, the only reason i did it was because i do buckets and a bucket is 9 litres, which is almost half the tank capacity. I got feather dusters come back, bristleworms, micro brittle stars too. I just let it completely alone except for the water changes and feeding now. No more touching/fiddling around with the tank! 1 Quote Link to comment
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