I've always wanted one to try and identify the culprit responsible for mystery zoa melting. Adam I might give you a call one of these days to stop by and power up that bad boy.

Alright, I checked with the UofC and they don't have any surplus scopes available for sale at the moment, the bio department just cleared all their old stuff out a couple of months ago. I just placed the order for the microscope I linked to earlier. I'm headed to the US on Friday until the end of the month, so it should be waiting for me when I get home.

I'm crossing my fingers that I'm going to come home to a tank that's magically fixed it's own brown slime problem, but now that I'll be able to look at it under a scope, I'm also sort of hoping it's still there. Someone came by to buy a pump off me last night and they think what I have is diatoms, which might make sense considering that this started both after my R/O membrane melted down and I started adding fish, but none of my snails will eat them, not even my mexican turbos, and they eat everything.

Levi, you are more than welcome to come by and use it. This scope comes with a USB camera so we should be able to take pictures of anything we can't ID ourselves and send them to experts if that's what needs to happen. If the USB camera ends up being useful, I'll probably upgrade to the higher rez model. Also it will give ma chance to buy some frags from you, I've recently been bitten by the zoa bug, and I need more.

I've also been toying with the idea of setting up my own mini C. irrritans study, I read all the published work on it, and the protocol for getting enough of it to study isn't that complicated, and could be easily accomplished with the equipment I already have. The other first order of business once I get this thing is going to be to start testing the bacterial cultures you can buy for your tank, such as Zeobak, Stability, etc. I've read in more than a few places that unless a bacterial culture is refrigerated, they're basically going to be dead by the time you get them. I've always been really curious to see if there is actually anything living in those very expensive supplements, and how long they stay alive in their bottles after you buy them.

Anyway, one way or another I'm going to get a correct ID one what it is that I'm dealing with.

My microscope was cheap, around 130$ or so, but it does the job. No need to have an expensive microscope. Sure it is better than mine, and I cannot see baterias because mine does not reach that level, but I can ID fish parasites like ick or velvet, and I can ID diatome and dino easily.

It was cool to see the black bugs (ok not so cool) to ID it and do the treatment with Advantage...

Here I took a video with my small kodak video cam..wish I had a microscope attachement because I did this handheld...not so easy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGJu0DitJXk

but I am very tempted to buy that microscope you posted in the link... It's in my shopping cart...hmmm...pressing the checkout button....hmmm...

I beat Dinos, I slowly raised alk to 10dkh, lights out for 4 days(ambient light 15 min a day to feed fish), reduced flow( it spreads it around), NO water changes ( don't know why but I know 10% daily did not help), temp 80 degrees, change socks daily(if you don't have them get them), after 4 days, blow off the rocks and vacuum the substrate.

the first time I did it I did lights out for 3 days, dino began to rear its ugly head again after a couple days, I then did a second lights out for 4 days, the dinos never reappeared (been 3 years now), I think I would have beat it the first time if I did the lights out for 4 days.

Good luck

Hmmm, i just noticed my doliatus rabbitfish going to town on this stuff. I'm starting to lean away from dinos

Don't know if anyone had said this but apparently Fauna Marin algae x says in their description that it removes dinoflagellates. Hope this helps

http://www.canadacorals.com/collecti...-ultra-algae-x

i'm sad to say i'm effected too

oooh, i didn't know you could get that in Canada directly. That's a good tool to have in one's bag of tricks. I'd use it as a last resort sort of thing if looking at it under a scope confirms that they are in fact dinos.

Yup. I've started using it to treat dinos.

http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/sho...852#post789852

So my microscope was waiting for me when I got home!

1. My roomate and her boyfriend did a spectacular job with my tank. The corals grew more in the 17 days they were taking care of it then in the past 2 months!

2. The brown slime is significantly reduced, but it's not gone. By 3:30 today (right now basically), there's a light dusting on the rocks that had it worst.

3. Only one coral seems like it's being damaged by the slime, but it was never really doing that well to begin with. ANd when I say slime, I really mean a super fine dusting that you have to look closely to notice.

Anyway, I grabbed some of the brown slime and took a picture with my microscope's camera. Forgive the teeny tiny file, the driver that came with the camera won't work, so I had to get a freeware version and I have no idea how to work it yet:

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/...ps996c1ac6.jpg

Thing is, they move. A lot. These things that form these brown sticky mats are in fact million and millions of tiny watermelon seed shaped swimming cells. that pic is at 10X mag, but at 40X you can actually see the little skirt of... something. It looks like a skirt of cilia as they go all the way around them. Does anyone know if these are in fact dinos? I took a short video too, I'll try and figure out how to upload it in a bit