How did I get dinos ? Changing rock help ?

[drew930]

I have dinos and I'm thinking about tearing down my 40 breeder and changing my sand out and leaving it lightless for awhile . If I do this I don't want to have them again and was thinking how I got it .

Can anyone tell me why people get dinos ? Is it feeding and flow ? Or is there more ?

Also, if I take my rock out ( that has dinos ) , and put back in and leave it lightless will it go away or should I replace my rock as well ?

[aecasasus]

Why such a drastic measure? Do you have any fish/coral?

[drew930]

Yes I do , I have fish and coral . And a maxima clam . I do have some fish I wanna catch to get out , and I do need some more sand regardless of dinos. My sand is lower than the frame in some spots . But I figured that since I have to take the rock out to catch the fish easier I might as well change my sand and it will have time to settle. And i will be able to take to clam to the LFS until my lights are back on .

I am also hooking up a kalkwasser auto top and GFO/ Carbon reactor . Possibly even a Neptune Apex . I figured this might be the beat thing to do considering the things I'm hooking up and that way I could keep my light out for a long time , and fix everything at once . What do you think ?

[dogstar74]

Hold on a second. I think you're going about this too drastically.

1. How old is your tank? Most tanks go through a cycle that includes Dinos. It's almost unavoidable, and it's rarely fatal.

2. Confirm your diagnosis. Dinos are a brown rusty colored film that grown on the sand and rocks it strings up in air filled pockets disappears overnight when the lights go out. only to re-appear the next morning and get more and more dense as the lights stay on. Cyano grows in mats of deep red or green.

3. Don't disturb or move the rocks to catch a fish. Drain the water down to about 2 inches of water, and corral them into a corner. Then fill the tank back up when the fish is caught.

4. It's been my experience that most of these types of nuisance algaes and organisms will burn themselves out. Given the right husbandry principals, (keep nutrients low, etc.) Most types of irritating organisms will run out of appropriate food sources and the tank will "Mature" through the event. Give it time. If you have some corals that you prize, then take a couple of small frags off the corals, and give them to a friend to "watch" for you, then if your colony ends up dieing during the bloom, you can always recover your initial coral.

Hope you get this figured out.
Aaron

[drew930]

My tank is about 7-8 months along . At a time , I had no light for about a month . ( went out ) . Was just fish in there . I have had 3 other tanks that I ugraded/downgraded from in the past and they all had a little bit of dinos.

The dinos fit the desription perfect . They get longer through day . I get them out with a net so it don't look bad . They break when I do this and little pieces come off of it . I do this about every other day .

The draining water does sound like a good idea that I did not think about . While my water was drained I could also put some sand in at that time .

Until last week , I have never ran kalkwasser , GFO or Carbon . I have been running kalkwasser for a week . ( probably not as much as I should yet . Don't wanna spike my levels fast .) I am picking up my kalkwasser reactor and my GFO and carbon reactor Thursday and will start running this .

One more thing ... I had red slime that started about the same time as this . I dosed with medicine and my skimmer would act crazy . I could not run skimmer and have not for 2 weeks . I just started carbon bag to get the medicine out , but need to change it , so I figured I'll wait on my reactor . With that being said, I did do the water changes to take medicine and waste out . I did not know this was bad for the dinos ! Just my luck

What do you think ?