Dinoflagellates ... is there an end to this nightmare

[Bob I]

Originally Posted by christyf5

What is chemi-clean and what does it do? Is it like chemi-pure??

Christy

Chemiclean - Formula by John Nobles
Exclusive with Boyd Enterprises.

That is what the package says, so it is marketed by Dick Boyd, the owner of Chemipure.

I have used it a number of times with great success on Cyano. Two days and it is gone.

[Delphinus]

Where would you recommend a person pick up some of the Chemiclean?

Might be worth pursuing...

[AJ_77]

Pisces claimed to have a bottle hiding behind the parts counter somewhere ($27.95), but I picked mine up at Wai's ($29.95). He had a few hanging there up behind his till.

Alan

[Bob I]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

Where would you recommend a person pick up some of the Chemiclean?

Might be worth pursuing...

I got mine from MOPS, but I no longer see it listed (I paid less than $15.00 for it) Maybe I will email Dan about getting more.

I don't have enough left to let you try mine.

[Bob I]

The product is still available from MOPS (www.mops.ca). You will find it under( Water Treatments, subcategory "water clarifiers, and algae control") The cost is $13.49, and if you order nothing else, you pay about $7.00 shipping, which is still less than at the local merchants' prices.
Bob

[Delphinus]

Update. (This is what, approximately 3 weeks since my original post..)

I did try some Chemi-Clean, and although it had an odd effect on the dinoflagellates, in the end it did not reduce the plague at all. It somehow made the bubbles bubblier (the tank foamed and frothed for 2 days ... it was REALLY gross). So .... um ... don't try Chemi-clean, I guess, to rid yourself of dinoflagellates. They may look similar to cyano, but they're totally different.

The one worry I have about anything that will specifically target dinoflagellates, is, well, zooxanthellae are dinoflagellates. So you definitely do not want to be adding anything that is toxic.

What I did try, which (TOUCH WOOD) seems to have worked, is, I turned my tank lights off for as long as I could stand. I had originally tried one day, and it made an impact, but it wasn't enough and the stuff came back. So I tried a second time, this time was to be "as long as I could stand it" which ended up being three days. It seems to have disappeared. This was about a week ago, and I have been slowly ramping my photoperiod back, 1/2 hour a day ever since (started at 1/2 hour on, and I started off making the increments actually 1/4 hour a day for fear I'd go too fast and burn something, then switched to 1/2 hour a day after I reached 1.5 hours).

Only thing is, as I kind of feared would happen, there were casualties. My purple cap, which is a weak coral I have been trying to save for many months now, suffered some bleaching. No tissue loss luckily, just a small bleached spot. Also I had a lettuce sea slug and I have not seen it in two weeks now (since just before the lights-out period). I know these guys are photosynthetic .... and now I am wishing I had pulled it out into another tank. Of course, I do not know what the survivability of these guys are at the best of times, or possibily another variable to consider that it ate some dinos which turned out to be toxic (it is, after all, a form of "red tide" which we know can be potentially toxic to some).

So my advice to anyone else who ever gets dinoflagellates infesting their tank: go straight to a lights-out period, it needs to be more than 1 day, but proceed carefully, watch out for bleaching and other deleterious effects from a lack of photosynthesis..

So, it's been almost two months in all since the crap started. Nothing short of the drastic measures of turning the lights off ever had an impact on the stuff. But I'm cautiously optimistic that maybe the worst has now passed. Here's hoping anyways!!