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let's play "is this dino?"

Tskiller

Tskiller

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Hey all, been dealing with some nuisance algea on my tank. At first, I figured that it was just new tank uglies, but after reading I want to check withh some more experienced folks to see if I actually have dinoflagellates, which seems much more serious.

It's a green/brown snot that covers some of my rocks. Not as much on the sand.

I suspect its dino, but I was having trouble finding good pictures online. Here is what I see:






What I've been doing is using a tooth brush on the rock. It breaks up immediately and goes into the water column. Sometimes just a turkey baster spray will lift it. I initially tried siphoning it out, but ti breaks up into very small pieces and I can't get it. Essentially now, I turn up my pumps and let the filter sock grab it, and I replace/clean that daily.

However, it comes back almost every day. Maybe not as bad as the day before, but in other random spots.


Is this dino, or is this just something else? If it is dino, what is my best plan of attack?
 
I am not the best at identifying different algae....so I will let others chime in but it look like it could be dino...

What are your nitrates & phosphate levels?

Has your tank cycled already, I think you started in may????
 
Looks like it to me. What's your photoperiod? I'm guessing longer than 8 hours? Reduce photoperiod. Don't overfeed. Keep manually removing it. You can do a whole tank blackout for like three days if nothing else works
 
I agree with @Coral reefer and what I did when I had an outbreak of Cyano is I turned off my lights and wrapped my tank for 5 days and it will not hurt any of the corals...they might not be the happiest but there are times in nature when the corals do get sun for more days than 5 days when a bad storm is happening...
 
I'm dealing with this right now also. In my case, I think when I drained the tank, the growth that I don't usually scrape on two of the walls began to die off. I scraped those walls when I saw it beginning to rot, but it had obviously affected the tank. Also think the sandbed had some die off due to being drained for a couple hours.

In my case, pretty sure it's dino. A new Blenny I bought ate some, and has disappeared. Pretty sure he's dead. He was acting "twitchy" for the day before he disappeared, had been healthy before that.

I'm also running a filter sock, with carbon, and each day I turkey baste as much as I can out of the tank, then I drop my water mixing pump (mag5) in the tank and blast all the rocks thoroughly with that.

I've been reading up on h2o2 for this, but I'm not sure about dumping an oxidizer in my tank. I have dealt with this before, and my regimen of daily blasting it and keeping the rocks clear has always worked eventually, but in two weeks I leave for a month so I'd like to clear it up fast if that was an option.

Other than snails, I think the Blenny is the first animal I've ever lost to Dino. Sad. It's frustrating but usually not unbeatable with some work and patience.
 
Ammonia is zero, nitrite is zero. Nitrates are about 10, phosphates look like .08 on the test to me. Higher than it should be. Tank is cycled though. I guess I'm mostly concerned if regular good husbandry and reducing nutrients can fix it, or if I actually need to do something special.

I have my lights on peak intensity for 8 hours, + a 1 hr ramp up on either end. I'll cut it to 6. I'll cut feeding a bit, and if it gets worse (its not that bad right now I suppose) I'll think about a blackout.

At least manual removal on this snot is relatively easy!
 
Since there's also a mix of green patches its hard to say but if you look at the left-center of the first pic, I'd say its dino cos I had 2 bad attacks of dino recently and now a happy reefer again :) (although most people say dino=end of hobby/restart)

I tried H2O2 which seem to help a bit but didn't get rid of it. Aggressive siphoning (either out as PWCs or into a filter sock in the sump) helped a lot. My best friend was AlgaeX by Fauna Marin. I did the 21 day dose once that cleared most of my dino in the first attack but since I guess there were traces, soon I it came back & I did a second treatment followed by a 3 day blackout towards the end. This marked end of dino in my tank :) For some reason the blackout combined with AlgaeX RTN'd some of my acros but rest were fine.

Btw, my lights were always 8hrs, feeding was always minimal and phos was always 0.03-0.05 so you can still have dino if everything in your tank is perfect...

Good luck getting rid of it. Don't give up...
 
Awesome, thanks for all the info. Hopefully I'll be able to clean it out without too much trouble, mine is nowhere near as bad as some of the pictures that I've seen posted.

I'm also going to start running GFO. Apparently the dinos can be eating my phosphate, making it appear that I have less than I actually do.
 
I've been reading that too and honestly there is a lot of conflicting information out there. I've been doing weekly changes so far so but I've decided to skip one this weekend. I've already cut back on feeding and photoperiod. With daily manual removal, there actually isn't much dino in the tank but it comes back every single day. If the regrowth doesn't seem to be slowing down, I'm going to be more aggressive and do a three day blackout next week.

I've also read some anecdotal evidence that suggests freshwater dipping my rocks might help by killing any dinos on it. Since its hard to remove everything manually, I'll start doing this one rock at a time to avoid a large scale die off this weekend. There is only one rock that I don't want to do this with is the one my Nem made his home on.
 
I was checking out your tank journal.

You first added water in your tank May 16th

About 2 weeks later you added 2 cardinals and a clown, and a handful of corals, including a bubble tipped anemone. Some people recommend waiting until a tank matures before adding a bubble tip.

This tank is very young. I think the green snot is associated with how early you added fish and the amount you added.


I would do what @650-IS350 recommended in those reefcentral threads.

Don't give up. It should go away. :) If you need someone to hold that rock with the anemone, ask a store if they will hold it for you. You could offer payment if they don't want to do it for free. Or maybe a member will hold it for you.
 
Basically your starve the hell outta the dino's, in the end they just turn to dust, siphon them then do a couple WC's, run carbon and other media to consume any nutrients left over and control the system back till its normal self
 
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