[jedimasterben]

Well, last Wednesday morning I unplugged all of my lighting, so only ambient light (measured 10 PAR coming in through the blinds in the morning to the front glass of the tank) for three days, and on Thursday I took a powerhead to all of the rocks and sand and stirred everything up in hopes to get as many dinos through the UV sterilizer as possible. On Friday night when I got home, I noticed that with the room light on, the tank was awfully yellow, so I flipped on a cool white CFL I have over the tank (which gives off a very pretty, bright white, and the water and everything was definitely yellow. I had recently replaced my ROX 0.8 carbon and I'm running two 400mL bags of Purigen, but that didn't stop this stuff, the Purigen was 100% pee yellow, so I pulled it out and started the regen process and put in a full cup of ROX 0.8, which cleared the water up within a couple of hours.

Plugged all of the lights back in on Saturday morning, and on Sunday I took a couple of water samples and put under a microscope. The water column was perfectly clean, nothing in it, but when I took some schmutz (basically leftover dino mucousy gunk) from a dead gorgonian and put it under 100x mag, I noticed tons of dead dinos and maybe half a dozen live ones. I scraped a bit off of a rock and put it under, and it had only a few dead but a bunch of live ones.

One unknown would be if the UV would actually kill the dinos outright or if it would just do as it is named and just sterilize them, which wouldn't really be apparent for 30 days according to the research by DNA above, assuming that I am plagued by O. ovata and not another species that would behave slightly differently.

At any rate, going forward, I will more than likely continue to do routine blackouts, I'm considering as much as weekly, every Wednesday through Friday, or possibly every other week, all the while keeping flow high in the tank to keep them suspended and keep flow through the sump (which has 100% of evertything go through the UV sterilizer ) at around 370GPH to keep stage one sterilization going.