Dinos in high nutrients?

MaverickReef · Oct 14, 2022

Hello all,

I have recently (within the past few weeks) began noticing dinos in my tank. I've had dinos before, so I'm pretty positive that's what they are. They are long stringy/slimy rust colored strands on my rockwork. I will add a few pictures when I get home from work.

My system has been up for about 15 months, it's a lps dominant 125 gallon tank with a 40 gallon sump. It's a bare-bottom no substrate, and the dinos don't seem to go away at night. I have been manually removing everything that I can get off of the rocks during weekly water changes. About a month ago I started paying much closer attention to the tank and started tracking all nutrients frequently.

Current Parameters (checked with red sea/salifert test kits):
Phosphate: 0.1ppm
Nitrate: 30 ppm
Alk: 8.0 dKh
Calc: 420 ppm
Mag: 1440 ppm
Sal: 1.026

Over the past month I have been bringing down nitrates and phosphates as they were at 50+ ppm and 0.5-1.0 ppm phosphate (I know extremely high). Which is why I thought it was weird that I'm showing dinos when I thought they thrived in a low nutrient environment, which mine is far from. Any ideas of how to tackle this problem?

Other info:
Started carbon dosing a week ago to lower nitrate and phosphate.
I just cleaned my skimmer and have it wet skimming and dumping that daily.
I have a fairly well stocked tanked with fish (3 tangs, 2 clowns, coral beauty, and 3 anthias) which I feed pellets and mysis daily with selcon dipped nori a couple times a week.
I run 3 ai primes, about a 10 hour light mostly blue/daylight spectrum
I also have change filter socks 2x weekly now, as well as have a cheaper UV sterilizer in my sump.
I run carbon media, purigen, and recently but since stopped GFO

Any advice is appreciated, thank you!

MaverickReef · Oct 14, 2022

this is probably some of the worst area of the tank, focused mostly on the rock above this chalice frag. Another note is that the tank does get a little natural sunlight in the morning on the side that the dinos seem to be thriving on

MaverickReef · Oct 15, 2022

Here is a better picture

Fishy888 · Oct 15, 2022

If the carbon dosing crashed N or P at some point, just long enough to kill off good bacteria, then dinos would have taken over. N and P might be higher now but if no competition gets added you'll be fighting dinos forever no matter how high N and P get.

If you can get some truly live rock from an established tank that will turn things around quickly. Getting some chaeto from an established tank would also help since pods and good bacteria live in it just like live rock. Try to get both. That's the only way I could beat dinos. Just don't let nutrients bottom out.

Either way I'd stop carbon dosing since with dinos it's like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

MaverickReef · Oct 16, 2022

Fishy888 said:
If the carbon dosing crashed N or P at some point, just long enough to kill off good bacteria, then dinos would have taken over. N and P might be higher now but if no competition gets added you'll be fighting dinos forever no matter how high N and P get.

If you can get some truly live rock from an established tank that will turn things around quickly. Getting some chaeto from an established tank would also help since pods and good bacteria live in it just like live rock. Try to get both. That's the only way I could beat dinos. Just don't let nutrients bottom out.

Either way I'd stop carbon dosing since with dinos it's like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Thanks for the input! I don't think my nutrients ever bottomed out as I have been testing every day, but they were out of balance with high nitrate and low phosphate, maybe that caused the dinos. I've stopped carbon dosing now and currently dosing microbacter7 with manual removal. Hopefully a couple weeks of this knocks them out