CoralClasher
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Doesn't my refugium make phytoplankton?
Dinoflagellates and NO3 and PO4. Why do I have to worry now?
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Brew12
Electrical Gru
I'm sure it does, the question is how much does it make. How often do you have to scrape your glass?
CoralClasher
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I scrape more Dinos off the glass than green twice a week
SMSREEF
Valuable Member
Could it be the real UV that halides and T5 put out?L.E.D. Lighting? May sound crazy, but guys have been running ULNS systems for years, carbon dosing, adding this, adding that and not getting dinos. Most running T5 or Metal Halide lighting. You never used to hear about dinos, cyano sure, but never dinos. Now that L.E.D's are the rage its like you can't go an hour without a new thread popping up about dinos. Not sure if it has any real correlation or not but we are studying it now to see. Just a thought since no one ever brings up lighting
I’m interested to to see your results...
For what it's worth, I have a bit of Dino at the moment, after I added blue LEDs to run with my plasma to remove the dull 6500k look. I had also done massive water changes , I hit zero on nitrate and phosphate. High or new light mixed with ultra low for me equalled Dino. So I'm dosing nitrate and feeding a little more to lift phosphate. 5 days in Dino receding. There is some kind of link.
Bret Brinkmann
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The competition that takes the place of dinos isn't phytoplankton. You want diatoms and green algae. Diatoms create PUAs (polyunsaturated aldehydes) as part of their metabolic functioning which is toxic to dinos. This is why some people dose Si to try and get a diatom bloom.
The green algae like GHA also use Fe. It is believed that in an Fe deficient environment dinos can't bloom as well as other algae and will die back while other algae increases in numbers. This would explain why so many people get GHA blooms when the dinos start to recede.
LEDs have UV too. They are generally a more focused less dispersed light that halides or T5s. Some LED systems can generate PAR in excess or 300. I think BRS measured around 500 PAR on one system. I think it is the higher and generally more focused PAR of LEDs that is causing the dino issues with regards to lighting. The higher PAR increases the metabolism of algae which then use more nutrients. The nutrients run out faster or aren't nearly enough to meet the demand so the dinos go after the nutrients in other algae which we perceive as a snotty bloom.
One member here got dinos only in his fuge after switching to a higher output LED light. He turned down the intensity and duration and it made a significant impact on the bloom. Still had to dose nutrients though.
This is an algae turf scrubber under different spectrums. Thought it was interesting. One side has lots of hair alge and the other has lots of cyano. Possibly dinos love blue light.
Are you sure it's dinos? I regularly have customers ask about the dark slimy coating, which looks exactly like this. I've had it myself during startup of a new screen. It's typically a phase that passes but it can last a while.
The stuff doesn't smell when the water is running over it, but when you shut it off it smells like Anthelia / Waving Hand when you remove that stuff from the water. It is very fragile and breaks off if you touch it, so a swipe of the palm and a rinse under the tap and it's gone - that's what I tell everyone to do when they see this stuff growing on their screen. It usually coats the GHA and gives the screen the appearance of "dark growth" so many erroneously assume they have high nutrients, but that's not it at all. This layer doesn't effectively block light because it's composed of super-fine hair-like strands of whatever. It seems bacterial to me, like a symbiotic type of bacteria that grows on the top layer of the algae under certain conditions. It can make the algae mat look like there are black streaks in the growth, or make the entire mat look black.
However I can concur from personal experience as well as the experience of a handful of my customers (who all had their lights replaced due to my error) that the higher-kelvin spectrum light tend to grow this more easily...which is why I don't use full spectrum lights.
The stuff doesn't smell when the water is running over it, but when you shut it off it smells like Anthelia / Waving Hand when you remove that stuff from the water. It is very fragile and breaks off if you touch it, so a swipe of the palm and a rinse under the tap and it's gone - that's what I tell everyone to do when they see this stuff growing on their screen. It usually coats the GHA and gives the screen the appearance of "dark growth" so many erroneously assume they have high nutrients, but that's not it at all. This layer doesn't effectively block light because it's composed of super-fine hair-like strands of whatever. It seems bacterial to me, like a symbiotic type of bacteria that grows on the top layer of the algae under certain conditions. It can make the algae mat look like there are black streaks in the growth, or make the entire mat look black.
However I can concur from personal experience as well as the experience of a handful of my customers (who all had their lights replaced due to my error) that the higher-kelvin spectrum light tend to grow this more easily...which is why I don't use full spectrum lights.
No i dont think that red is dino i think its cyano. But my point was that we need to experiment like this to see if we can grow dinos with a spectrum change. The example simply shows that different lighting conditions encourages different photosynthetic organisms. I find it interesting.
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