Dinos, GHA, and Cyano

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I started battling dinos a few months ago after overdoing carbon dosing. Knocked it way back with good bacteria dosing, but it has been slowly creeping back, and is now pretty noticeable again. I had ostreopsis before, but haven't double checked yet to see if that's the same kind I have now. Does behave the same though. I have also been having a good bit of GHA growing in my tank, and a cyano problem all at the same time. I've been siphoning and manually removing all that I can every few days for a couple of weeks, but don't seem to be getting anywhere. I'm not sure what the best plan would be to try to get past all three of these issues or at least not sure what order I should approach them.

Tank background:
150 gallon display with 125 gallon sump.

40 gallon fuge section in sump with cheto

display is a mixed reef

Only have 2 urchins as CUC now as I have a porcupine puffer and have been afraid to add CUC. I had tried adding a few snails and the puffer seemed to ignore them, but they didn't seem to do much in the tank and dies within a week or two. Not sure why.

Have a jebao 38W uv in the sump. 24/7

I've been considering adding a seahare for the GHA, but again worried about the puffer. Would it hurt the puffer or rest of the tank if I got one and the puffer nipped at or ate the seahare?


I am on a fairly strict reefing budget at the moment due to a baby on the way, so hoping to find a decent cost effective solution that I can implement now. If the solution is pricy, it will have to wait and I'll have to keep pulling my hair out trying to manually remove for a while untill I can afford to buy anything pricey.
 

taricha

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Urchins are my favorite grazer. Snails are likely dying due to dino toxins. Nothing can grow well on a diet that includes very many dino cells.

I think you have most of the stuff you'd need at the moment.
Move UV to the display, in/out of display shows MUCH more effect than in sump.
Run GAC for toxins. In addition to your siphoning, export as much as you can through skimming, Algae fuge etc. Keep PO4 and NO3 at moderate but always present levels. Don't overfeed - feed normally.

I'd worry about dinos first, then cyano - siphon the mats out repeatedly, even if it doesn't seem effective at first. Every time you do so, you export the cyano and all the goodies it entangles in the cyano mat that fuels it. Worry about GHA last, and only after dinos are long gone.
 
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Urchins are my favorite grazer. Snails are likely dying due to dino toxins. Nothing can grow well on a diet that includes very many dino cells.

I think you have most of the stuff you'd need at the moment.
Move UV to the display, in/out of display shows MUCH more effect than in sump.
Run GAC for toxins. In addition to your siphoning, export as much as you can through skimming, Algae fuge etc. Keep PO4 and NO3 at moderate but always present levels. Don't overfeed - feed normally.

I'd worry about dinos first, then cyano - siphon the mats out repeatedly, even if it doesn't seem effective at first. Every time you do so, you export the cyano and all the goodies it entangles in the cyano mat that fuels it. Worry about GHA last, and only after dinos are long gone.
Thank you for the advice, I will find a way to get the UV moved to the display to see if that helps.

When you say export as much as I can, are you referring to the dinos and other algae masses, or are you referring to nitrate/phosphate? The reason I ask is you mentioned skimming and fuge. I didn't think skimming or the fuge would directly remove any algae, just the phosphate and nitrate that fuel it.

I've used chemiclean before with good success for cyano. Once I get rid of the dino outbreak, would taht be a good option for the cyano, or would that make the dino more likely to come back?

I've recently found some threads where vibrant was said to help with dinos at higher dosages. Being that it is also popular for other algae, would that possibly be a good option to try?
 

taricha

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by export I mean everything. skimming, harvesting algae from fuge, siphoning nuisance growth from display etc. At some point we want the dinos to be forced to compete for resources (other than N & P) with other organisms like green algae etc. lots of export of every kind is required for that to happen. If there's minimal export then the necessary feedings of the tank will just grow more and more of everything.
When you chemically kill off a mass of one organism (cyano) then many people see other algae - often dinos or GHA grow quickly in response to the newly available goodies.
 
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by export I mean everything. skimming, harvesting algae from fuge, siphoning nuisance growth from display etc. At some point we want the dinos to be forced to compete for resources (other than N & P) with other organisms like green algae etc. lots of export of every kind is required for that to happen. If there's minimal export then the necessary feedings of the tank will just grow more and more of everything.
When you chemically kill off a mass of one organism (cyano) then many people see other algae - often dinos or GHA grow quickly in response to the newly available goodies.
Thank you, that makes sense to me. I will keep up with manual removal of algae from the display, harvest cheato, and skim. I'll also monitor nitrate and phosphate and dose as needed to keep at low, but readable numbers. My usual target is 3-5ppm nitrate and 0.1 phosphate.
 

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