It's been an extremely long time since I've posted anything to do with my tanks in this section. I've had two, 20gal nanos for years and years and had many beautiful successes with those tanks. I got bombed with dinoflagellates a few years ago after a move. No idea where they came from; maybe they were always there in small quanities and just went bonkers for some reason. It started as a patch of what I was sure was cyano that I couldn't seem to do anything to and it just kept growing and CUC kept mysteriously disappearing. For those unfamiliar with that pest, calling dinoflagellates catastrophic is not an exaggeration. They are certainly the worst thing I've ever had to deal wtih. Although not true for all species, mine really did look indistinguishable from cyano by day, so I had to get lucky and check the tank at around 3AM one night to realize all this "cyano" I couldn't put a dent in suddenly looked pretty weird (dinos get wiggly at certain times of night - but mine basically waited until the witching hour to do it rather than right after lights off). Many species are toxic for CUC to eat, so I lost all but a couple of hitchhiker-type inverts. It even nearly wiped out my bristleworms. I had read and heard in my many years of reef keeping that combatting the stuff is brutal and can destroy the tank no matter what approach you tank. Folks aren't kidding about that. Dinos are robust to light deprivation so they can outlast corals with blackout treatments, they thrive in low nutrient systems so a skimmer can actually make it worse, and they don't give up easily even if you switch to a high nutrient regime - they will bloom even more at first. Whatever variety I had also looooved a good invasive tank cleaning. About 48h after any attempt I made to vigorously clean the tanks, they got dino-bombed even worse than before the cleaning. By the time I realized what I was really dealing with, many corals had also been melted by it, although some of my more potent soft corals, BTAs, and two fish were fine. I really wondered about getting out of the hobby at that point since I'm more of an invert person than anything else. I also started to get paranoid about my RODI system - was my TDS meter broken? Was some mystery chemical sneaking through in unmeasurable quantities and being my enemy? Nope, I think that's just what it's like when you get a bad batch of dinos, and you either have to nuke them chemically or ecologically and ecologically is hard.
I was never able to identify what species of dinos I had, so I opted to try to fight them naturally and tediously via just a slightly higher level of nutrients. I read/heard of too many short-term success but long-term failure cases using more sophistocated nutrient dosing to try anything else in such a small volume of water. Live rock also seems rather hard to get in small quantities these days so I didn't want to nuke my rock with a chemical treatment and risk killing my corals and creating what might have to be fish-only systems for a long time. My tanks have always maintained such a high population of pods due to the 1-fish-per-tank stocking that I hardly had to feed the fish; everything had become low nutrient...so I just fed the fish more a bit more frequently and decided to see where that took me, since that which had survived the dinos so far seemed to be hanging in there without too much issue. It took about 2 years and running two UV sterilizers per tank 24/7 at two different flow rates to be rid of the stuff without resorting to invert-toxic and potentially coral-toxic chemical treatments.
Of course, once the dinos were beaten back, something else annoying would bloom. To not deal with follow-up mini blooms of dinos, I had to basically let whatever wanted grow in its place do so and not disturb it too much as the ecosystem iteratively tried to right itself and different species of algaes slowly overtook one another. So, I have been staring at two embarassing, absolute scuzzy algae messes of tanks for the past couple years, each with zero CUC, some mucky-looking soft corals and anemones, and just a single fish per tank that is a strangely critical pin of the nutrient system. Robust pods survived, so I have a rich ecosystem of teeny-tiny creatures, just not anything that can eat larger algae - so naturally hair algae finally won the algae battle. My canister filters never got dino-bombed (no light - perpetual black-out!) and are still living filters full of sponges and other filter feeders. My BTAs in the past have done rare instances of sexual reproduction despite being in a nano. This week I saw a couple of brand new, tiny BTA babies that seem to have come from such an event. I also have a population of hitchhikers limpets that I thought had been wiped out by the dinos but is actually starting to rebound, and they have been growing really well. It takes a healthy system even if a hiddeous algae mess for both of those things to happen, so I feel like that means I'm finally in the clear and can start to rebuild.
There are no decent saltwater shops left anywhere near where I currently live, at least not where I can get healthy CUC-type inverts to start fixing up these tanks, so I finally just mail-ordered some CUC before the temperatures drop too much. Wish me luck.
If anyone else here has dealt with an aggressive variety of dinoflagellates by some means other than just throwing in the towel or doing a risky chemical bomb, I would be very interested to hear your story.
I was never able to identify what species of dinos I had, so I opted to try to fight them naturally and tediously via just a slightly higher level of nutrients. I read/heard of too many short-term success but long-term failure cases using more sophistocated nutrient dosing to try anything else in such a small volume of water. Live rock also seems rather hard to get in small quantities these days so I didn't want to nuke my rock with a chemical treatment and risk killing my corals and creating what might have to be fish-only systems for a long time. My tanks have always maintained such a high population of pods due to the 1-fish-per-tank stocking that I hardly had to feed the fish; everything had become low nutrient...so I just fed the fish more a bit more frequently and decided to see where that took me, since that which had survived the dinos so far seemed to be hanging in there without too much issue. It took about 2 years and running two UV sterilizers per tank 24/7 at two different flow rates to be rid of the stuff without resorting to invert-toxic and potentially coral-toxic chemical treatments.
Of course, once the dinos were beaten back, something else annoying would bloom. To not deal with follow-up mini blooms of dinos, I had to basically let whatever wanted grow in its place do so and not disturb it too much as the ecosystem iteratively tried to right itself and different species of algaes slowly overtook one another. So, I have been staring at two embarassing, absolute scuzzy algae messes of tanks for the past couple years, each with zero CUC, some mucky-looking soft corals and anemones, and just a single fish per tank that is a strangely critical pin of the nutrient system. Robust pods survived, so I have a rich ecosystem of teeny-tiny creatures, just not anything that can eat larger algae - so naturally hair algae finally won the algae battle. My canister filters never got dino-bombed (no light - perpetual black-out!) and are still living filters full of sponges and other filter feeders. My BTAs in the past have done rare instances of sexual reproduction despite being in a nano. This week I saw a couple of brand new, tiny BTA babies that seem to have come from such an event. I also have a population of hitchhikers limpets that I thought had been wiped out by the dinos but is actually starting to rebound, and they have been growing really well. It takes a healthy system even if a hiddeous algae mess for both of those things to happen, so I feel like that means I'm finally in the clear and can start to rebuild.
There are no decent saltwater shops left anywhere near where I currently live, at least not where I can get healthy CUC-type inverts to start fixing up these tanks, so I finally just mail-ordered some CUC before the temperatures drop too much. Wish me luck.
If anyone else here has dealt with an aggressive variety of dinoflagellates by some means other than just throwing in the towel or doing a risky chemical bomb, I would be very interested to hear your story.
Anyway...so if these don't move, then I have to decide whether to pry them off or not. For now I'll leave it but I need to try to ID those things to know if they're just a nuissance freeloader on that one snail or if they're acctually doing something more nefarious.
Hazards of buying stuff sight unseen online I guess. Maybe it'll green up later...probably not though. At least I have good hopes for the Xenia having a niche in the tank.
