knappe
Community Member
This is mostly a post of encouragement for those that have been and/or are fighting dinos.
I'm not sure I would have been able to win this fight without the ample advice found on this forum. So this is also a shout-out to those who have been extremely helpful in offering their time and support in the multitude of posts over the years.
To set the scene:
I first noticed a few spots of growth on the sand bed in a 12 gallon I had been recently gifted. I wasn't too surprised at seeing this because this tank had been a victim of neglect, with inconsistent water changes and enough relatively minor issues that my friend decided to call it quits and gift me the tank. So while this was a tank that had been stable and running for 10+ years, it was also recovering.
This lead to what turned out to be a MASSIVE problem because it meant that I was late to identify the dinos. This let the dinos go crazy and mostly take over the entire tank.
I'm not exaggerating here. This is what the tank looked back in July 2025:
That poor rockflower anemone was absolutely under siege by this point.
But to explain how we got here, I think a bit of background is necessary. We all know that 12 gallons are notoriously hard to keep stable. Explaining to my non-fish friends that a 120 gallon tank is easier to keep than a 12 gallon is always non-intuitive. So when I say that this tank was recovering from neglect, you can see why I wasn't as vigilant as I perhaps should have been.
This was further complicated by the fact that I had what I think was an event that tipped off the entire dino take over -- I went on vacation.
While on vacation, I had set up an autofeeder that had been used on this tank for years. The problem is that this same autofeeder then dumped 20x the amount of food that was needed, while I was away for a few days. This meant that when I came home, the tank was covered in bloated, uneaten pellets and was in dire need of a massive water change AND thorough scrubbing. I also lost livestock. It wasn't a full wipe, but I did lose the main inhabitant in the form of Freddie the clownfish.
This was in the end of April 2025. Looking back at my logs, the overfeeding caused the pH to drop to undetectable levels in my API tests. The pH test bottoms out at 7.4 and I suspect it was quite a bit below that. I tried a few things to help stabalize the system, but even with all of my efforts the pH still remained quite low and the ammonia kept rising.
So now we go from a recovering tank, where the softies were starting to really bounce back to one that looks like this:
You can barely make out the rockflower anemone in the background. Not a lot of dinos, yet but you can see a few longer strands of stuff that should have been a warning sign.
I think my optimism in getting the tank to recover is best illustrated by the picture I took of Fred's replacement (Frank) as I was adding them to the tank in, June 2025. You'll notice my patience here in waiting 3 months to add a replacement to the tank.
Looking closely at the picture, you can really start to see the dinos starting to appear.
So what did I do to combat the dinos? A lot of research. I spent a ton of time reading about others who had gone through this same problem and just trying to come to a consensus on if I had dinos and how to best bring the system back into equilibrium. My three best pieces of advice:
- READ!
- Stay steady and be consistent
- Keep a log (you should be doing this already, anyway)
I even bought a microscope in an attempt to identify what kind of dinos I had (if they were), but was never able to get a decent ID on them. But all of the telltale signs were there, as you can see by July 2025.
After doing a lot of research, my main plan of action was:
NOTHING!
I say this kinda facetiously, but the best way to combat the dino takeover was to let them starve. This meant doing minimal water changes (none at all in some cases) to avoid adding in additional nutrients. This was completely counter-intuitive, but worked wonders. I combined this with an initial blackout period of 4 days, in which I moved all of the livestock over to a different tank. It took months of minimal (or no) water changes and few more blackout periods to get the tank back into a steady state, but it is really coming back hard now. By September 2025 I was even starting to feel optimistic about getting the tank into recovery state.
So how do we look today? Great!
I think I might need to clean up the coraline
My timeline might be accelerated by the form factor of the tank -- I went from the over feeding event in April 2025, to finally IDing the dinos in June 2025 to being optimistic about the tank in September 2025. I know that this can be a longer fight in larger form factors. But, it can be done.
I'm not sure I would have been able to win this fight without the ample advice found on this forum. So this is also a shout-out to those who have been extremely helpful in offering their time and support in the multitude of posts over the years.
To set the scene:
I first noticed a few spots of growth on the sand bed in a 12 gallon I had been recently gifted. I wasn't too surprised at seeing this because this tank had been a victim of neglect, with inconsistent water changes and enough relatively minor issues that my friend decided to call it quits and gift me the tank. So while this was a tank that had been stable and running for 10+ years, it was also recovering.
This lead to what turned out to be a MASSIVE problem because it meant that I was late to identify the dinos. This let the dinos go crazy and mostly take over the entire tank.
I'm not exaggerating here. This is what the tank looked back in July 2025:
That poor rockflower anemone was absolutely under siege by this point.
But to explain how we got here, I think a bit of background is necessary. We all know that 12 gallons are notoriously hard to keep stable. Explaining to my non-fish friends that a 120 gallon tank is easier to keep than a 12 gallon is always non-intuitive. So when I say that this tank was recovering from neglect, you can see why I wasn't as vigilant as I perhaps should have been.
This was further complicated by the fact that I had what I think was an event that tipped off the entire dino take over -- I went on vacation.
While on vacation, I had set up an autofeeder that had been used on this tank for years. The problem is that this same autofeeder then dumped 20x the amount of food that was needed, while I was away for a few days. This meant that when I came home, the tank was covered in bloated, uneaten pellets and was in dire need of a massive water change AND thorough scrubbing. I also lost livestock. It wasn't a full wipe, but I did lose the main inhabitant in the form of Freddie the clownfish.
This was in the end of April 2025. Looking back at my logs, the overfeeding caused the pH to drop to undetectable levels in my API tests. The pH test bottoms out at 7.4 and I suspect it was quite a bit below that. I tried a few things to help stabalize the system, but even with all of my efforts the pH still remained quite low and the ammonia kept rising.
So now we go from a recovering tank, where the softies were starting to really bounce back to one that looks like this:
You can barely make out the rockflower anemone in the background. Not a lot of dinos, yet but you can see a few longer strands of stuff that should have been a warning sign.
I think my optimism in getting the tank to recover is best illustrated by the picture I took of Fred's replacement (Frank) as I was adding them to the tank in, June 2025. You'll notice my patience here in waiting 3 months to add a replacement to the tank.
Looking closely at the picture, you can really start to see the dinos starting to appear.
So what did I do to combat the dinos? A lot of research. I spent a ton of time reading about others who had gone through this same problem and just trying to come to a consensus on if I had dinos and how to best bring the system back into equilibrium. My three best pieces of advice:
- READ!
- Stay steady and be consistent
- Keep a log (you should be doing this already, anyway)
I even bought a microscope in an attempt to identify what kind of dinos I had (if they were), but was never able to get a decent ID on them. But all of the telltale signs were there, as you can see by July 2025.
After doing a lot of research, my main plan of action was:
NOTHING!
I say this kinda facetiously, but the best way to combat the dino takeover was to let them starve. This meant doing minimal water changes (none at all in some cases) to avoid adding in additional nutrients. This was completely counter-intuitive, but worked wonders. I combined this with an initial blackout period of 4 days, in which I moved all of the livestock over to a different tank. It took months of minimal (or no) water changes and few more blackout periods to get the tank back into a steady state, but it is really coming back hard now. By September 2025 I was even starting to feel optimistic about getting the tank into recovery state.
So how do we look today? Great!
I think I might need to clean up the coraline
My timeline might be accelerated by the form factor of the tank -- I went from the over feeding event in April 2025, to finally IDing the dinos in June 2025 to being optimistic about the tank in September 2025. I know that this can be a longer fight in larger form factors. But, it can be done.
Those things STINK!
