Dinoflagellates

[Ben Broyles]

Thought I'd put my 2 cents in here. I have a monster case of Dino in my tank so I'm following advice from this thread and from other stuff that I've read. I killed all my lights for ...today is day 3....and tried to get my pH up to 8.6+. I checked it yesterday and it looked like it was at about 8.1 so I was kinda ticked. I dosed Kalk again and got it back up. I have been manually scrubbing the rocks, glass and power heads with a toothbrush then doing a 5-10 gallon water change (90G tank) every weekend so suck out some of the crap from the sandbed and water. We will see how it looks when I hit the lights again today but from what I can tell, my rocks look good as ever and there isnt crap building up on the powerheads anymore. I was thinking about leaving the lights off for 5 days but I know my corals are hating life and I like to see my fish so I'm gonna get em back in the light today.

[CoryDude]

I wouldn't do any water changes, and only scrub the rocks outside of the tank.

The best trick that worked for me with minimal work was dosing the kalk like your doing and keeping the ph between 8.3-8.4. I didn't do any water changes, and did not scrub the rocks. I also kept the lights off for 3 days at a time, then would let them run for 3 days. My acros did fine, and the dinos were gone after the 3rd on/off cycle (about 2.5 weeks total).

[Ben Broyles]

Thanks for the input Cory. Question for you... why not do water changes? I've read that too along with vacuuming out the junk when you scrape it off to get rid of it. I could certainly stand to not do water "changes" but just add water weekly like I normally do to compensate for evaporation, but I was wondering what the reasoning is behind it.

[CoryDude]

No problem dude! I know everyone has their little tricks, so this is just one approach that worked for me.

The dinos start to deplete whatever trace elements they need, so if you're changing water, the new salt mix is adding those trace elements back into the tank. You're basically trying to starve out the dinos by limiting their food source, ie trace elements and light.

Also, if you're blowing the dinos off the rocks and vacuuming it up, you're not removing every bit you blasted off. So the dinos start to grow again where ever they land, which just spreads the problem to new areas. As we've both seen these devils grow very fast. If you're going to scrape or use a turkey baster on the rocks, do it outside of the tank in a separate bucket so you won't reintroduce them back into the tank.

[kkiel02]

With diatoms and dino I have had good success by removing silicates and phosphates from the water column. I think GFO will do the trick but read the label first to make sure it will pull the silicates out. This will get them out of you display unless you reintroduce them. If you start seeing them again after you have gotten rid of them, you are somehow adding the silicates back into your system somehow. I would then check your water filter or possibly your salt.