Dinoflagellata (Dinoflagellate)

Source

QUICK STATS

• Care Level:
  
• Reef Compatible:
  
• Max. Size: -
  
• Diet:
  
• Origin:

Other links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinoflagellate

The whole aquarium seemed to be filled with it, all the rocks, the sand.
Here you can see it in an early stage (Early March):



2 weeks later it got more:




It also grew over polyps and corals, which we had to clean daily



Early april (one month time) it became less on the rocks...we cleaned weekly, trying to get every bit of it out, but within a short time it was back again. In the morning it was not much yet, but after a short time of lighting it was back.
The spots where the algae didn't show up anymore where left with a grey dustcover


The Xenia seems to have trouble with it most, or it might be something different, not sure, but the rock the Xenia was on is covered with grey a lot.


Within 2 months the Xenia is almost gone, the rocks are grey and a lot of different algae types have disapeared like the neomeris. All the algae still alive and polyps still alive still get covered with some brown cover. But it seems to become less...maybe the fact that the lights are on 2 hours shorter might have helped.

The (algae) species are most likely Dinoflagellates. According to one of the forums I visit they are brown coloured, and smell when you take them out of the water. Well this seems to match that what we have/had in the aquarium.
Why do I say had? Well it seems to have disappeared mostly now, so hopefully it will be all gone soon.

The Dinoflagellate is almost gone, well actually…it is gone, some left on some other corals, but if we remove those it should be gone entirely. Guess that turning down the light to 9 hours worked like a charm .

All the rocks have been brushed of, so no remains on the rocks. All the algae is removed, so no remains on them either. Only the back remains.

Every last bit of it is removed...we are clean!

The brown stuff seems to be returning, currently only on the lower regions, but some rocks are also covered now. Turned the light down to 10 hours last weekend, might turn it down some more this weekend. The plan is to keep the lights of after cleaning this weekend.

Got a potion to kill of the flagellates or Red Algae bacteria. Hopefully it will be gone within a week now. It’s called Mycosidol from Colombo. I will keep the post up-to-date with the latest results.

Monday the first attempt to remove the Brown/red mess that is covering the rocks and starting to cover some corals, has started. Like I mentioned in an earlier post I bought an anti biotic called Mycosidol. This is an anti biotic against Red Algae, but also kills other bacteria.
First we started cleaning the aquarium, removing as much of the stuff from the rocks and sand as possible and added some new water. Next we removed the Carbon filters and the Biological filters. The Biological filters are stored in some water hoping that the good bacteria in there don’t die, the Carbon filters are going straight to the trash can. According to the manual the bacteria that create the mess could be in the Carbon filters, which makes sense, since it’s one of the things we didn’t change after rebuilding.
The aquarium now filters over Cotton and will do so for the next 3 days. After installing the cotton filters we added the Mycosidol, it comes in capsules, each capsule is enough for 25 litres of water, so we added 10 capsules (opened them up and dropped the content in the aquarium). Pumps needed to stay on to mix it in the water, wasn’t sure about the skimmer, but we left it on (didn’t say in the manual).
At this point it all looks good, see how things look tomorrow.

According to the manual after 3 days you could put the filters back in, so our guess was that by then everything should be gone. Unfortunately in the last few days we slowly saw it return again. Of course it still looks better then it did before, but that is because we cleaned the aquarium very well. Our next step is either try again, or see if we can find a antibiotic for Flagellates.

The everlasting battle against the brown stuff, it is still not becoming less and with new buttons it’s becoming more of a problem. We are now going to stop with the Salifert Coral Food, see if this helped the growth of this stuff. We are going to stop giving it from today, so hopefully we will get results soon (after cleaning?).

we think it is getting less. So this would mean the Salifert Coral Food or Trace Soft was responsible for this. A next action is not yet thought of, but I’m just glad that it is becoming less. Or maybe it was the frozen food, we haven’t given them that for two weeks also, yesterday was the first time again. Frozen mysis for the fish, frozen fish for the anemone and frozen “stuff” for corals. We will see if anything changes in the next few days.

Still no trace of it. We did start adding Trace Soft again, but it doesn't seem to affect anything.