Ready to throw in the towel from Dinos

[qhduong]

Hi @Alexreefer, wondering how your tank is doing? Dino still away? I'm battling through dino as well. First time was few months ago where a 3 day black out and increased temps seems to have killed it. This time it came back worse... currently doing H2O2 and another blackout to try and kill it. This time my nitrate and phosphate were 10ppm and 0.08 so not sure why they came back...

 

[Alexreefer]

Hi @Alexreefer, wondering how your tank is doing? Dino still away? I'm battling through dino as well. First time was few months ago where a 3 day black out and increased temps seems to have killed it. This time it came back worse... currently doing H2O2 and another blackout to try and kill it. This time my nitrate and phosphate were 10ppm and 0.08 so not sure why they came back...

Hey, all is good with the tank. not sure why but places on the rocks always have some red algae but the rest of the tank is only hair algae. Now that summer is here i feel like i haven't treated the tank as much as i do in the winter but with some cleaning it stays acceptable. I have tried blackouts before and they seem to work for a couple of days until dinos find a way back. feel free to keep giving updates so we can work on your problem together

 

[NanoMixer]

Corals will use it. I don't recommend adding corals during a dino bloom or shortly after because other algae usually bloom after dinos are gone. Plus if you aren't running GAC then dino toxins could be building up and would stress a new coral out even more than normal acclimation stress. Impulse purchases usually lead to mortality. It's soooooo hard but resist the urge to add anything until you are through this.



Amphidinium dinos can't be effectively stirred into the water column. You'd be kicking up what ever is in your sand bed. If you don't have sand cleaning organisms in your sand then who knows what would be released. Plus any sediments would irritate corals. Amphidinium will respond favorably to bacteria dosing like MicroBactor 7. If you are up for it, then you can remove and rinse your sand like in Brandon's thread. Just make sure that if you do rinse the sand you follow his instructions carefully and don't cut corners.



I beat my dinos over a year ago and they never came back. I used the nutrient dosing method. I dosed nitrates and phosphates to maintain at least 5 ppm nitrates and 0.1 ppm phosphates. People get dinos due to bottoming out nutrients and usually with higher intensity lighting. I used to fit that category. Now I just maintain nutrients by inorganic dosing and NOT over feeding. More on that below.



Water changes usually add a little iron which helps the dinos. It is believed that other algae can outcompete dinos in an Fe deficient environment.

I haven't heard of anyone verifying that blue light only helps with dinos but reducing light intensity has been verified to help. When people reduce all but blue the overall light intensity decreases which I believe give people the illusion that blue is better. It's not better, reducing intensity overall is. Reducing intensity reduces the demand for nutrients which helps raise them faster and gets quicker results. Still not going to happen overnight. Just remember it took time to get yourself into this mess, so it makes sense that it will take time to get out of it.

Many creatures will eat dinos but NOTHING can live on a sustained diet of dinos due to the toxins they also ingest with them. Ultimately they will die from it. Some just take a little longer.



GFO will add trace amounts of Fe which will help dinos bloom more. GFO is not recommended during a dino bloom. Plus bottoming out phosphates is what sparks nearly all dino blooms in the first place. So anything that reduces phosphates would be counterproductive while trying to beat dinos.

Running GAC is recommended because most strains of dinos release toxins into the water. In terms of snails, I have found astrea and turbo snails to have the least tolerance for dino toxins. The GAC will help with toxins but use half the recommended dose and change weekly to keep the efficiency up.



Dinos are a type of algae. Algae uses light, especially blue. This goes back to reducing light intensity being way more important than limiting light spectrum.

Stopping skimming is a good idea as it too reduces nutrients, which bottoming them out is how we get in this situation in the first place.

I don't recommend feeding heavy as your source of nutrient dosing because food is made up of more than just nitrates and phosphates. You are adding a ton of other undesirable stuff like S, DOCs, and who knows what else. The competing algae have an easier time absorbing inorganic sources of nutrients than dinos. Thus why I recommend dosing something like Seachem Flourish for phosphates and Spectrocide stump remover for nitrates. Spectrocide sounds horrible but it is pure 100% KNO3. People who dose inorganic sources rather than over feeding get results sooner.

I know this is an old thread, but this was helpful thanks. Just started dosing today. Went out of town for a couple of weeks, came back to large turf algae bloom due to overfeeding. Manually removed a significant portion without thinking, causing phosphate to spike in a low nitrate system. I have tons of pods so I’m hoping dosing with already existing competition will work. This is my second battle with dinos. I won the first battle six months ago with all new live rock (nano tank, so it wasn’t a huge deal to replace it all).