[karimwassef]

That's not my experience at all.

I had a booming population of pods... tens of thousands before dinos and I added even more after. My tank is 380g DT and 700g system and I could not put my hand in the water without feeling them on my hands when I take my hands out.

Even my protein skimmer effluent and solid waste had pods.

I don't have mechanical filtration so their reproductive cycle is uninterrupted and I fed a lot of phyto. I tried socks for a bit and they got jammed with pods.

I even had a breeding population (several hundred) of ghost shrimp in my fuge.

I also had worms breeding in my sand bed.

Point is that I didn't lack for diversity.

I used LaCl to reduce my phosphates and dinos came as the algae died. We can argue if the loss of algae also impacted the pod population, but there are a lot of places to hide in my tank.

After the infestation, I added more biofauna... it didn't help much.

I don't argue that some pods and ciliates eat dinos. That's true. But they are neither capable of stopping the explosion caused by chemical factors (too much carbon dosing, LaCl, algaeX,...), not can they cure it after the fact.

No one ever said... I got a mandarin and that gave me dinos. Or I got too many pod eating fish and that's how I got them. This thread starts with "I wanted to get rid of my algae problem so I..."

So while the pods population may be coincidental, it isn't causal in my view.