I used h202 and it didn't do anything but I will keep searching these forums I'm sure I'll find some more good reads
fwiw, i had prorocentrum too along with my amphidinium and a ton of cyano and increasing N and P while dosing silicates was very slowly working on getting the dino’s in check but the tank was getting rough looking and i was losing corals. i was getting real sick of it so i decided it's time to get really aggressive, because if it kept going the way it was, i would have to tear down the tank anyways. what finally did the trick was this: (and i don't wanna get the RIP clean folks too excited here because i didn't actually do a full RIP clean soooo chill on that lol)
I was thinking about doing the same thing where I only take the top layer of sand off as well and I was going to toss it out and replace with some Tampa bay live sand that comes from the ocean. My set up is a 40 breeder so it shouldn't take a lot of sand to replace if I only remove the top layer. Where did you get your sand from?
thats a good idea too. i think keeping the lights off for a while afterwards was key for me too, which allowed bacteria and ciliates and other stuff to spread faster than the photosynthetic dino.
here’s a before/after of mine. the before is from nov 9, after vacuuming the sand. rocks and everything else still looked rough, and the sand went back brown probably a couple days after, then i did my whole tank revamp. second pic is from today.
do you siphon your sand out or just gravel vac the dino’s out?
I try to just get the Dino’s, but some sand always comes out with it,
i found it made a big difference when i actually took out the top layer of the sand with them. i think it gets more of them out and makes sure they’re not just being mixed back into the sand. been doing that along with dosing silicate and basically everything else you’ve mentioned as well. i go a few weeks without seeing them making brown mats in the sand, but i still see them under the microscope, so i figured i’ll just keep going every few weeks with this until either they’re gone or the sand is gone.
let me know how this goes! like i said earlier, i think as i see dinos forming brown mats in my sand i’ll slowly suck the sand out until its all gone. then maybe use some IPSF or aquabiomics stuff to seed some sand for a few months in a separate bucket before adding back (as long as dino’s are gone obviously)
I got home right before lights out so corals are starting to close. But it still looks great as far as Dino’s go.
