How do you all deal with Dinos?

[BrettE2]

I'm struggling with a lot of dinos, and I'm curious what others do for them. I've read a bunch in R2R, but the advice seems to be all over the place: carbon dosing, various bacterial cocktails, raising nutrients, lowering nutrients, UV does/doesn't work, silica does/doesn't work.

If I don't scrub the rocks, they end up covered in a combo of GHA and dinos. When I do scrub the rocks, they look ok for a bit, but the gha and dinos still come right back. They start coming back in hours it seems like.

What I'm doing currently is based on advice from Cris Cap at Aquatic Art:

• Dosing silica daily.
• A light scrub of the rocks every day or two or three
• A more thorough scrub about once a week
• Keeping nitrates above 10 ppm
• Keeping phosphates above 0.1 ppm
• (just started) dosing Kalk to boost the pH a bit
• Running a 57 Watt UV at about 350 gallons/hour (I measured using a stop watch and my "graduated" bucket)

Tank is about 160 total system volume
NO3: 17 ppm
PO4 0.2 ppm

Images:

Here's an overview under the microscope:

 

[jda123]

Get some urchins and more snail/crabs to eat the hair. It will help if the dinos don't have places to live. Keep pulling the algae to help out the increased crew. An order from a place like ReefTopia is a good idea and you money goes further. Watch the video from Rich Ross on Algae from MANCA a few years back - awesome stuff.

Do you know what kind of dinos that those are? If you can ID the type, you can get a better cure. Dinos is about as generic as algae.

Generally speaking, dinos, hair and other pests like this are a byproduct of lack of true diversity in the system - more of an issue since dry/dead rock have been in the hobby. They just move in faster than bacteria, good algae and other things that already are present on real live rock. A live rock pack can help this, but it can be slow going... but you have to start somewhere. This can be a uncounted cost of not starting with live rock from the jump. If you have film bacteria and other types of good algae (like coralline that is alive) on the rocks, then the hair, diatoms, cyano and dinos cannot grow there.

 

[BrettE2]

That's what I've been reading all over: lack of competition leads to a single organism taking over.

I have three tuxedo urchins. Whenever I try to add snails, they're typically dead in a week or two. I attributed that to eating dinos, which I understand are toxic to them.

However it could also be that my salinity has dropped down to about 32ppt. That's a result of my DOS for auto water change acting up. I'm starting to think that's more trouble than it's worth...

I'm not 100% certain of the type of dinos, but I believe they're osteopsis? I think I included microscope images in my post; did those show up?

Thanks!!
Brett

 

[Vested]

Those are ostreopsis for sure they are toxic. UV at the right strength will wipe them out because they go into the water column, otherwise get your nutrients up a lot more. Atleast 1ppm po4

 

[SynDen]

I generally don't question Cris but dosing silica sounds highly suspect. There are many types of dino, and many of them feed off of silica, so dosing it could make things worse. Of course I don't know your type of dino very well either

I had them a while back on my old tank and took forever to figure what was the root cause. Eventually figured out it was that I wasnt running a second DI when I made water. Denver water mains have large sections that are still clay pipes so downtown around my house tends to be very high in silica. This led to a build up of silica in my tank and it took me more then a year to get it out.

During all that I tried every dino treatment I could find. Did hydrogen peroxide dosing with blackout periods a few times. It would always knock it back but it was short lived. Tried about 5-6 other things too and nothing work.

In the end it was 2 things that got it under control
1) adding an additional DI to my RODI, so that I could guarantee no more silica was making in the tank
2) a UV light - running on a timer and was on at night and off during the day

After making those 2 changes the dinos disappeared withing a month or so. The reason the UV light is very effective against dinos is that most dinos become free floating at night. They release at night, and spread around the tank, then anchor down again in the morning, which makes it the perfect way to kill them with a UV light.

 

[BrettE2]

Those are ostreopsis for sure they are toxic. UV at the right strength will wipe them out because they go into the water column, otherwise get your nutrients up a lot more. Atleast 1ppm po4

I think I have UV at the right strength?

Water volume: ~160 gallons
Wattage: 57 Watts (1 Watt/2.8 gallons)
Flow: 350 gallons/hour (2.2x tank vol/hour)

Plumbed directly to the display tank. In and out are near the water surface.

These guys don't seem to go up into the water column. They seem to just stick to the GHA and not let go. That's why I've been scrubbing for the last 3-4 weeks, but it doesn't seem to cut it. Maybe I'm not scrubbing enough?

I generally don't question Cris but dosing silica sounds highly suspect. There are many types of dino, and many of them feed off of silica, so dosing it could make things worse. Of course I don't know your type of dino very well either

My understanding with the Silica is that Silica leads to diatoms, and the diatoms will help out-compete the dinos. Also from what I understand, dinos don't consume Silica, but I'm not sure I could point to a source for that.

I believe my water is in good shape. I just changed out all the RO/DI membranes and resins a couple months ago. I did an ICP test on the RO/DI water, and there was nothing detected in the water.

If you're curious, here's the test result from last month:
https://lab.atiaquaristik.com/share/3fb12a2213518a2c5938

 

[jda123]

I am not a dino pro. Sorry. I have live rock going back to GBR and Marshall Island days which does not allow most things to take hold. I would deal with them by ordering some live rock and letting the stuff spread while also manually removing the hair and dinos. Put the real live rock in the tank and the old stuff in a non-lit fuge or sump until some film bacteria can start to grow on it... at least as much as you can. You might have to catch a crab or shrimp on the live rock, but that is a lot easier than dealing with all of these pests.

You need full strength seawater for most inverts to thrive. I also keep my residual no3 and po4 near seawater and my snails all grow and do well. Ceriths and astreas are cheap from the Gulf and usually not demanding. You can get pincushions, pencils and rock urchins from local divers down there for less than $10.

This newer fad of encouraging something else to stop another is just dumb, IMO. Why not go ahead and go all the way and stop providing sterile petri dishes for bad things to take hold? Trying to grow diatoms to stop dinos is just madness to me. This type of thing has killed ecosystems all over the earth - the hawks and snakes brought in to kill rats on some islands have done worse things than the rats did, for example. The unintended consequence are just too great and most of them are unknown. What usually happens is that you end up with more than one thing thriving and they don't even interact with one and another.

If you want to spend money in ICP, at least use a good company like Oceamo. IMO, most of them are trash, but that one should have at least show some po4 and P if you can detect it yourself - and nearly no seawater is devoid of P in some form especially when all organics have it and there are micro organics in every water sample before the plasma nukes it.

Like so much in this hobby, not all UV is the same. Are you sure that you have a good one? If some unbranded or generic Chinese knock-off, then it likely is not strong enough.

As for the DOS, most automation is not worth the effort and many just stop after a while. A quality ATO like Osmolator is about al that you need. Otherwise, the more than you set up robots to keep your eyes off of the tank, the less that things work out well. Long story, but I wrong my own controller on an old Mac Mini in J2EE/Ruby/Bash with 2 of 3 redundant probes for everything and I shut it down... just one more arse to wipe and it was just an expensive timer since I could not trust any of the probes ore reading enough to make decisions without me. The old reliable calcium reactor is too good and so is a Ranco for temperature. I put the code on GitHub a long time ago.

 

[jda123]

Also, please don't try and kill dinos. Dinos are in every one of your corals and you will harm them too.

Watch this, if you have not:

 

[BrettE2]

Like so much in this hobby, not all UV is the same. Are you sure that you have a good one? If some unbranded or generic Chinese knock-off, then it likely is not strong enough.

I believe it was made by a company called Aqua Ultraviolet. I bought it March of 2024, and I believe the bulbs are good for 14 months, but I was planning to swap the bulb and quartz tube in March. I took it apart a month or two ago, and there was a large amount of brown crud stuck on the quartz tube. I soaked it with citric acid to remove it, and it seemed nice and clean again. I haven't checked to verify that the brown crud hasn't returned.

 

[BrettE2]

Here's the tube before I cleaned it.