I'm discouraged. My tank is in a holding pattern. I'm feeding phyto, and enough pellets/mysis for an imaginary clownfish. I have *maybe* 0.2 nitrates, undetectable phosphate (Salifert for both). Skimmer is producing 30mL to 60mL a week, set at max wet. (I'm collecting it in a bottle a la Montireef) There's no other algae. The dinos on the sandbed have been replaced by cyano. Or a mix. It's difficult to tell.
The dinos on the glass aren't going away. I get a white fog on the glass which eventually turns yellow and develops the odd spot pattern of dinos.
Where's the green algae? Diatoms? Anybody? Looking at my monthly tank shots I see that my sandbed is becoming less and less alive. There aren't any hair worms along the front at all anymore. No spaghetti worms in the sandbed. Pod population has come back to normal, and seems to hang out on the glass in the dinos. Sandbed is clumping into little hillocks, oddly.
I am very hesitant to add fish or inverts back as I don't really know what the toxin level is.
Advice? Suggestions?
Here's a sandbed pic. Can't really tell if that's dinos mixed in the cyano or what. The green isn't algae, it's a different strain of cyano. The blurry trio at the bottom center are green pods.
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Ivy
I'd really like to know what was going on in Montireef's cultured skimmate. Were conditions anoxic/anaerobic? Did the bottle contain the motherload of n-fixing bacteria? Or was it the protozoan predators?
Oh and the 2" coat of dinoflagellates was more neglect than severity of infestation. I had literally never heard of dinos being a problem in captive systems and assumed I was seeing normal algal sucession in a new tank. I'm a 'wait and see' aquarium keeper so I didn't panic until things started dying.