fendanto
Community Member
Hi there; so I’ve been battling with dinos for a month or so now. I’m now in the “please god make it stop” phase and decided to try some things based on research.
This is what my tank looked like about a week ago, about a day after a siphoning + glass cleaning:
As you can see, there’s clearly a red patch in the corner (I can assure you it appears fairly red in person). I assumed this to be cyano and it was making mats so I wanted to let that cultivate to try to choke out the dinos. Unfortunately, it started getting bubbles underneath and eventually large sections of it dispersed up to the surface so I siphoned up most of it recently in my last cleanup…
I’ve not been running my skimmer, have been overfeeding, and as of two days ago, I’ve turned off the lights and turned the temp up to 82F. I know that a full blackout is the real prescription here but it seems to have done quite a bit of good, especially in tandem with the temperature change:
So now when I look in the tank, all I’m able to see are what looks like thin remnants of the more reddish patch that used to take up the whole corner.
All that is to say: do you think those red-brown patches are cyano or dinos? (Or both) What should my approach be from here? Keep at it and observe? One of my hammers is receding but it was already struggling before the temp change, so I turned the skimmer back on but I’m going to make sure the nutrients don’t drop too much (it was never removing nutrients fast enough to cause a nutrient drought anyway)
Thanks for your help!
This is what my tank looked like about a week ago, about a day after a siphoning + glass cleaning:
As you can see, there’s clearly a red patch in the corner (I can assure you it appears fairly red in person). I assumed this to be cyano and it was making mats so I wanted to let that cultivate to try to choke out the dinos. Unfortunately, it started getting bubbles underneath and eventually large sections of it dispersed up to the surface so I siphoned up most of it recently in my last cleanup…
I’ve not been running my skimmer, have been overfeeding, and as of two days ago, I’ve turned off the lights and turned the temp up to 82F. I know that a full blackout is the real prescription here but it seems to have done quite a bit of good, especially in tandem with the temperature change:
So now when I look in the tank, all I’m able to see are what looks like thin remnants of the more reddish patch that used to take up the whole corner.
All that is to say: do you think those red-brown patches are cyano or dinos? (Or both) What should my approach be from here? Keep at it and observe? One of my hammers is receding but it was already struggling before the temp change, so I turned the skimmer back on but I’m going to make sure the nutrients don’t drop too much (it was never removing nutrients fast enough to cause a nutrient drought anyway)
Thanks for your help!
