How to Keep Dinos Extinct

[QuiGonJay]

Stuggling with dinoflaggelates in my 28gallon tank. It's an all-in-one model about 6 months old. Currently no skimmer. Have done some research and it appears to be all over the board and somewhat dependent upon the type of dinos you have. I have the ones that look very much like diatoms until you start seeing those evil little oxygen bubbles . . . .

While 3 days light out combined with cleaning out the dinos on the sand helped, they come back within a week or two of ramping the lights back up to a minimum level (i.e. 4 to 5 hours).

I've read about raising PH, not doing water changes, doing water changes, GFO, etc. Honestly, not sure where to start. As it stands right now, I'm going to do another sand clean up (which will require a small water change) and another 3 day light out period. I recently added ChemiPure elite to the media basket to help with Nitrates (at around 15/20).

Inhabitants are some snails, hermits, emerald crab, decorator crab, striped blenny, watchman goby. No corals per se, though there is a very nicely growing Caribbean rose that came in on a live rock I don't want to lose along with the usual small hitchhiker corals.

For the past month, I've been limiting light to 4 to 5 hours a day and feeding only every other day what the two fish can eat in less than a minute. The decorator gets hand fed a small bit of shrimp about twice a week to supplement.

Any advice on where to start from folks that have battled these buggers?

[FraggledRock]

get a skimmer.

do water changes.

dont raise ph.

dont over feed.

use RODI water.

[GilliganReef]

This is going to be a long battle for you. First you need skimmer like fraggledrock said. Next you need to run GFO/carbon.
Bring your light hours down to half what they are now.
Siphon the algae into a filter sock every day or every other. Best thing to do is turn off your PH and blow all your rock. You will get this snot looking film floating in your tank. Siphon as much as that up. Replace that sock after.
Do your normal w/c.
once a month do a 3day black out and its up to you on how to ramp up your lights. I like to do a day and half of blue before I full day of whites. after the 3 days make sure you do a siphon and w/c on last day of black out.
Last thing I added that helped me battle DINOS was beneficial bacteria. I have been doing the prodio bioclean every 15days w/ reef booster every 6 weeks for my corals. This helped me get good algae growing back on my rocks.

[coralsnaked]

IMHO stop doing all of the above. Simply feed the fish and remove the Dino algae daily as best you can from corals and equipment. Let the other algae begin to grow as well as and especially Cyano. Eventually they will outcompete the fastest growers like Dinos. Once the Dinos retreat then you can deal w/ the competing algae and Cyano in the usual manners as listed above, as these methods work well on the competing algae but not Dinos. It will be ugly but it will pass in time.

[QuiGonJay]

Thanks. Well, not overfeeding, no ph change, have been doing water changes and I have always used Rodi water so only one to go, right? ;). Do you need a reactor for gfo? Can it be run in a media basket (currently I have carbon and chemipure elite in my media basket. Will look for a small skimmer to fit. Will need to be a hang on one I think.

[fizzlefish]

I dosed peroxide. Dino's were the worst thing to ever happen to me in the hobby. New tank because of it.

[wolfblue]

You wont ever get a live organism like dino's or cyano out of a reef tank. They will always be there. You aim for conditions that they don't like so there is not enough for you to see. If the conditions that favor them return, they return.

[QuiGonJay]

Wolfblue, that makes sense (unfortunately!). So what conditions don't dinos like (other than keeping my tank dark, which I don't really want to do long term?

[IanWR]

I had success ridding my tank of dinos with an aggressive blackout and waterchange regimen. I did a 3 day black out every week for 3 weeks in a row. I would then do another 3 day every time dinos reappeared. The gap kept getting longer, from days to weeks. The last one was over a month. It's been over 6 months since I have seen any evidence of dinos.

For my blackouts I would do a thorough cleaning of rock and sand. Then wrap the tank completely, no peeking. Then unwrap on the third day after the lights would normally be out. I also found it helped to add filter floss on top of the filter socks during the blackout as so much gunk got caught I could change it 2 or 3 times on day 3.

I know this is not a panacea, but it did work for me.

[wolfblue]

I have seen dino's on a small scale with tanks under a year old but its never been a problem for me. I would say get a good protein skimmer, my opinion and I think most would agree. Maybe siphon all the sand out. Also whatever they like makes up what they are so you cant go wrong continually siphoning the dinos out best you can.

The cures are all over the place because there are about 2000 different things that people call dino's. Use the search function on RC and read everything until you see parallels between your situation and others. Try what worked for the people with tanks like yours.

[QuiGonJay]

Sigh. Going to be a long few months. Thanks for all the info, if I have any luck I will post the results.