How to keep the dinos away?!

[GothFishKeeper]

When I first put all the macros in this tank, a dino bloom quickly came about, and it was a mess. A LFS that I frequent told me to do a 48 hour total blackout, followed by 2 weeks of daily dosing of these three products:

And it very much worked, the progress a few weeks later can be seen in this post here:

Honest thoughts on my macroalgae tank?

When I first converted this from a nano reef to a macroalgae tank and stuck in the first few pieces of algae, all my coworkers/friends who are more into planted FW tanks, and some that are really into macroalgae as well, were like “omg that looks so good”. Over the past couple months I’ve added...

www.reef2reef.com

Then last week when I noticed some more dinos popping up along with major hair algae blooms, so I did another blackout. This time it didn’t seem to affect much at all and I’m very confused as to why. Here is a video from today showing how bad it’s gotten again:



As you can see I removed most of the fast growing red gracilaria and I put it in the refugium of my reef system after doing a FW dip on it. I did this in hopes that the nutrients will be able to rise because as fast as everything was growing, especially the gracilaria, the nutrients kept bottoming out in less than a day before I could even dose again.

I ordered some potentially slower growing macros to go in their place, but I wanna get rid of the dinos, hair algae, and cyano before I put them in. Should I do a longer blackout? I’m at a loss

 

[tmccaff]

How I got rid of dinos is this! Use a UV Sterilizer, do a water change but not actually remove water but use a small micron bag to a pump. Check both phosphates and Nitrates make sure not zero on either. Nitrates should be 16:1 ratio to phosphates. Don't do any water changes except what I suggest above.

If that don't work. You can remove rock one by one and scrub it off in a bucket. Mine was a lot worse.

It's caused by imbalance of nutrients as either nitrate or phosphates hit zero or both. Hope this helps. Uv works well with dinos!

 

[GothFishKeeper]

How I got rid of dinos is this! Use a UV Sterilizer, do a water change but not actually remove water but use a small micron bag to a pump. Check both phosphates and Nitrates make sure not zero on either. Nitrates should be 16:1 ratio to phosphates. Don't do any water changes except what I suggest above.

I assume the micron bag to the pump is to catch the dinos, but how can i be sure that none of them are attached to my macros still? I have a UV sterilizer in the first aio filtration chamber.

 

[Lavey29]

Blackouts are a bandaid temporary fix that does not address the underlying source of your problems so you will have continued algae problems.

 

[tmccaff]

Depends on species of dinos some move in water column and the micron bag will help with that. Yes, you don't want to do a water change per say. It be beneficial to first see what species you have. You can get a cheap microscope that will tell you what you have.

If UV isn't helping much most likely you have Amphidinium species.

 

[GothFishKeeper]

Blackouts are a bandaid temporary fix that does not address the underlying source of your problems so you will have continued algae problems.

I fully agree with this, but how do I address the underlying problems when I have a white light on the tank that’s meant to grow the macroalgae?

 

[tmccaff]

I fully agree with this, but how do I address the underlying problems when I have a white light on the tank that’s meant to grow the macroalgae?

You want Nitrate/ Phosphate higher to make competing algae to starve out dino's. What is your nitrate/phosphate level now? That is why doing a water change with dinos will make it worse. Looking at pics looks like your tank is too clean not a lot of algae. How is Nitrates introduced into tank, I am confused on your tank no fish? How you getting nitrates or phosphates?

 

[Peter Houde]

Talk about a planted aquarium