Dino ID and Advice Please

[Vertigo916]

Can somebody please ID the type of dinoflagellates I have and advice on how to get rid of them? They're all over my sand and making my tank look hideous. Any help is very much appreciated.

 

[UnnamedReef]

I'm no expert, but looks like Prorocentrum to me. I recently beat them after 6+ months of fighting. They were concentrated in the sand bed, but took over the rocks at certain points during the battle.

UV isn't very effective against Prorocentrum, blackouts didn't work for me either. Unfortunately your best weapon is tank maturity, it simply takes time for the biome to fight them.

Manual removal is always helpful, I personally used a 5 micron sock and vacuumed the sand daily. Strains out the dinos, and avoids doing a water change. Dosing silicate helps too, I used SpongeExcel. Make absolutely sure you keep your phosphate and nitrate up (at least .10 phosphate and 10 nitrate). Phosphate is most critical. If you can increase your flow a bit, and add some sand-sifters (for me a tiger conch was extremely helpful). Helps break up dino clumps and makes the sand bed harder for them to inhabit.

Mine got so bad I did a rip clean. I did a whole thread on it, but it's a pretty nuclear approach that I wouldn't recommend unless you have the time and equipment to do it correctly.

 

[Reef.]

I'm no expert, but looks like Prorocentrum to me. I recently beat them after 6+ months of fighting. They were concentrated in the sand bed, but took over the rocks at certain points during the battle.

UV isn't very effective against Prorocentrum, blackouts didn't work for me either. Unfortunately your best weapon is tank maturity, it simply takes time for the biome to fight them.

Manual removal is always helpful, I personally used a 5 micron sock and vacuumed the sand daily. Strains out the dinos, and avoids doing a water change. Dosing silicate helps too, I used SpongeExcel. Make absolutely sure you keep your phosphate and nitrate up (at least .10 phosphate and 10 nitrate). Phosphate is most critical. If you can increase your flow a bit, and add some sand-sifters (for me a tiger conch was extremely helpful). Helps break up dino clumps and makes the sand bed harder for them to inhabit.

Mine got so bad I did a rip clean. I did a whole thread on it, but it's a pretty nuclear approach that I wouldn't recommend unless you have the time and equipment to do it correctly.

I agree with this, only change I would make would be using a 1 micron sock, if you are buying a sock you might as well go as small as you can, they actually do a 0.5 micron sock too, doing this a couple of times a day will make a huge difference, you need to keep it up though for probably 2 weeks minimum.

 

[Vertigo916]

I'm no expert, but looks like Prorocentrum to me. I recently beat them after 6+ months of fighting. They were concentrated in the sand bed, but took over the rocks at certain points during the battle.

UV isn't very effective against Prorocentrum, blackouts didn't work for me either. Unfortunately your best weapon is tank maturity, it simply takes time for the biome to fight them.

Manual removal is always helpful, I personally used a 5 micron sock and vacuumed the sand daily. Strains out the dinos, and avoids doing a water change. Dosing silicate helps too, I used SpongeExcel. Make absolutely sure you keep your phosphate and nitrate up (at least .10 phosphate and 10 nitrate). Phosphate is most critical. If you can increase your flow a bit, and add some sand-sifters (for me a tiger conch was extremely helpful). Helps break up dino clumps and makes the sand bed harder for them to inhabit.

Mine got so bad I did a rip clean. I did a whole thread on it, but it's a pretty nuclear approach that I wouldn't recommend unless you have the time and equipment to do it correctly.

Thank you for identifying it and thank you so much for letting me know what you did to beat it. The tank is 9 months old (20 gallon) Red Sea Max Nano AIO. Maybe it just needs to mature a little more.

 

[UnnamedReef]

Yeah you're definitely in that phase where you'll remove them and make progress, and they'll be back a few days later. The more you stay on them, and the more consistent you are, you WILL see improvements in the time it takes them to recover their population. Keep driving out the bad guys and supporting the god guys and eventually your tank will come around. I still see small patches sometimes, but they're short lived now that my tank is more well-established.