Brown slime - toxic

[melev]

For the past few days, I've been watching some brown stuff growing on the back glass of my tank. Fearing it was dinos, I didn't do anything. My plan was to scrape it off and siphon it out at the same time, but even with my son helping today, that didn't work. As I scraped, it didn't come off in chunks or sheets, but rather it dissolved into lots of little bits.

All circulation was off to avoid this. Once I realized it was pointless because I couldn't get it out as planned, I went to option #2 and restarted circulation so the skimmer could pull it out.

While I was working, Spock followed me around where I was working and seemed to like eating the brown stuff once it was released from the glass. All the anemones in the reef as well as the plumbed-in angled tank responded quickly, looking very unhappy. And what shocked me more was that Spock turned very dark, almost black. Even the yellow area of her forehead and the orange of her lips - all very very dark.

Quickly, I ran 3 cups of fresh carbon on the tank and cleaned the skimmer to get the best efficiency out of it. Spock looked better a few minutes later, and a few hours later the anemones looked better as well.

I'm pretty sure these were dinoflagellates, which often are toxic to snails. I think the anemones inhaled it and quickly reacted negatively, and Spock's ingesting it was a mistake as well. In the future, I'll have to find a better safer way to scrape and siphon out this stuff.

In the meantime, the tank looks much better, nice and clean.

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And from a slight angle.

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Looking in through the end of the tank.

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And looking at it from the reflection on the front glass.

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Another reflection shot from the opposite end of the tank.

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And the Rose BTAs looked better as well.

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[Matthew_sample]

When that happens and you need to put the carbon in fastwhat do you put it in and were do you put it?

 

[DaveJ]

Glad they recovered.. next time scrap with a siphon going right next to it. Hopefully you won't have them again though.....

 

[GraviT]

Say it isn't so! This is really strange how dinoflagellate infestations used to be fairly rare and now it's starting to pop up everyplace. :sad: I've talked to several people, even some LFSs lately that are having the same issue.

I lost my PBT, 3 BTAs and my entire cleanup crew to this stuff. :sad:

 

[melev]

It appeared after I dosed my tank with Chemi-Clean recently to remove cyano bacteria. It doesn't happen every time, but I know twice it appeared after treating.

And over the past week it had been growing up the glass so I wanted to get it out. I may make a scraping box out of acrylic with a siphon connected to remove it in the future. It won't help on rockwork or corals, but on the glass it would probably do the job better.

I always run carbon through a Phosban Reactor. It doesn't work nearly as fast as my post indicated, but within 24 hours all my water has surely cycled through the media. It would only have to move 14gph hour through the reactor to accomplish that, and I'm sure it is flowing faster than that.

 

[Serk]

@Marc wrote:

Unfortunately, that's assuming water that's already gone through the reactor doesn't go through it again, and that only un-treated water goes through the reactor...

In reality, you could have that reactor on your tank for years, running 24x7, and mathematically SOME water would still never have gone through it...

Good luck with this stuff!!!

 

[Nazrac]

@Serk wrote:

Unfortunately, that's assuming water that's already gone through the reactor doesn't go through it again, and that only un-treated water goes through the reactor...

In reality, you could have that reactor on your tank for years, running 24x7, and mathematically SOME water would still never have gone through it..."]

Ok i see your logic but through dillution what you are trying to remove even if all water did go through the reactor you would only remove some of the impurities and even if it was 100% effective you would still only be reducing the impurity after you reintroduce the now "clean" water back in. but still it works out pretty good to remove all but a small fraction of the impurities. I wonder if you can get an actually turnover rate kinda like a half-life figured out.

 

[jklnbrg]

@GraviT wrote:

I have no idea how often this is popping up but.. could it be that with all of us passing livestock/rocks/corals between ourselves thatt some of these issues are being passed from tank to tank?

Just a thought....

 

[Ashlar]

Ooh, good point- just like the 'sherman' anemones are acclimated to tank life better than your average wild caught 'nem, maybe we're doing the same with nuisances as well.

 

[Darby]

I'd really like to see a pictoral comparison of Cyano and Dinos, as to me they sound like they look exactly the same..

BTW Marc, beautiful tank! Makes me want to fall prey to several of the deadly sins!

 

[Animal Mother]

I've had some brown slime pop up in my 75 gallon over the past week. Seems that it is leeching out of some rocks. At first I thought it was some kind of worm coming out of a hole, but then I noticed it happening on another rock, used the baster to suck it out, definitely not a worm, and never had cyano ooze out of rocks before. Just brown goo.

Sound like dino?

Nothing's reacting poorly and my skimmer runs 24/7. The only thing that has changed is I started dosing kalkwasser.

 

[melev]

Two nights ago, I scraped the walls of the angled tank to get rid of the brown stuff in there. It was the same as before, and the two BTAs in that tank quickly shriveled up from its release in the water. A couple of hours later they looked good again.

So I guess if you see it in your tank, better to scrape it away while it is a small amount before it becomes a large patchy area.