[34cygni]

Thanks for taking on the task of developing a useful FAQ, Quiet_Ivy.

Originally Posted by So You Think You Have Dinos

Dosing peroxide at 2mL/10gallons has helped a few people, but has NOT worked for the majority. Whole tank dosing of peroxide is dangerous to small ornamental shrimp and clams.

H2O2 + UV was a thing back in 2014...

11/09/2013, 03:19 PM #82
Josh40996
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I have been battling Dinoflagellates for some months now and have tried lots of methods to eradicate them in conjunction with lights out, with each only providing a Dino. free reef for several seconds after lights back on.

Recently, I invested in a 24 watt UV sterilizer for my 30 gallon reef and installed it on my tank. I turned off my lights and covered the aquarium for 3 days. During the 3 days of darkness, I continued to dose H2O2. 1ml of 35% H2O2 per day.

The results are spectacular! Once lights were resumed, no Dino bloom and any remaining Dinos. have slowly disappeared. The skimmer went nuts for the 3 days the lights were off and after the 3rd day, the skimmer collection jug overflown. I have been Dino. free now for 3 almost 4 days now and have done my first water change in almost a month and still no Dinos. bloom as a WC always promoted. For me, even a week free from Dinoflagellates is worth anything as it is the most problem free the tank has been for months.

I am a very happy chap.

...UV in conjunction with the H2O2 really did the trick

08/23/2014, 05:02 PM #318
LelandF.

Well I've been fighting dinoflagellates for over 2 years in my 200gal reef, and I feel I've finally beat them. I've literally tried everything over the last 2 years. I replaced my sand bed, I did a 3 day blackout, I changed large amounts of water every week, I didn't change any water for months, I tried large amounts of GFO, I tried large amounts of activated carbon, I tried vodka dosing, I tried replacing the light bulbs, I tried UV, I tried adding a brightly lit refugium, full of caulerpa and chaeto, etc. I am a very educated, long time aquarist, and I've always had successful reef aquariums, but this tank has been a headache to say the least.

After trying everything I decided that I was going to go at the Dino's hard, or tear the tank down and start it over with new rock and sand. I figured that I would spend a large sum of money on starting over, and with my luck the Dino's would probably just come back.

So, my current tank is 7'x2'x2', with 2-vortech mp40's, one on each end facing each other. I normally have them on quick pulse, but changed them to 100% power on continuous mode, and increased the size of my return pump to increase turnover through my sump & skimmer. I added a filter bag to my sump, and added a aqua UV unit that I hung on the main tank w PVC and a mag drive to help sterilize the main tanks water quickly. I changed my dosing pump to dose the kalkwasser make-up water during the day instead of the night, to raise the daytime pH. I also added 2mL/10gal of fresh peroxide for 8 days. I also started blasting my rocks and whole tank with a power head, in the morning and evening.

Within 2 days the Dino's were almost gone. In 5 days, there weren't any Dino's to be found.

...but it didn't catch on because the dinos always came back.

I don't know as anyone has tried H2O2 + UV and followed up with the dirty method or pods & phyto to keep the dinos down, but it looks like it might be worth a shot.

Originally Posted by taricha

I have so many dinos to experiment on...

Not to mention what looks like a proper lab bench to work on. Neat. Where are you doing your mad scientist thing?

Have you tried transplanting a beaker of dino sand into your 10G live sand culture tank? That is, have you tried the reverse of the experiment with the phyto tea in an upside-down fish bowl?

Or if you don't want to risk that, have you played around with feeding dinos to your phyto tea? The idea being to increase the populations of whatever creatures, be they bacteria or protists or microfauna, are eating the dinos before you dose your tank.

Originally Posted by justthewife

I am wondering if the dino's were feeding on the added bacteria.

Seachem Stability contains a lot of nitrogen cycle bacteria, but in a fully cycled tank, at any given moment there are about as many N-cycle bacteria as the tank can support. Even if the bacteria in Stability successfully hatch and take over the appropriate ecological niches in your sand bed, their success will come at the expense of an established population of nitrogen cycle bacteria, so large numbers of bacteria are dying somewhere and providing a burst of fresh nutrients for the dinos' bacteria farms.

Or maybe some OTC bacteria products are dino chow, as you suggested.

Quiet_Ivy may have better info in her chart, but IIRC PorkchopExpress and cal_stir reported OTC bacteria-in-a-bottle did nothing and stopped dosing. There doesn't seem to have been much enthusiasm for it until relatively recently, though this is an exception:

02/06/2015, 08:41 AM #743
GilliganReef

I beat DINOS by:
running a GFO reactor, Carbon reactor
every other day siphon into filter socks/replace
weekly 10% W/C, every other week 25%
3 days lights out once a month.
The thing I found to help really fight it was adding beneficial bacteria into my tank.
Started 15 day prodibio Bioclean
6 weeks prodibio reefboaster.
Been doing this for 3 months now and No DINOs.