Any luck stopping dinos in the early stages?

[CRABDADDY]

My tank has had low nutrient levels for the past month or so. 1-5 ppm nitrate and 0 phosphate. This started when I added a skimmer because I wanted to feed more heavily. Now I'm beginning to see dinos around the tank. It's not an disaster yet, but I'd like to prevent it from getting worse.

I've been consistently dosing a few mLs of neophos every day. Occasionally I'll see phosphates rise above 0, but they go right back to being bottomed out.

I'm feeding heavily, using reef roids once or twice a week, leaning towards pellet food. None of this seems to get phosphates consistently.

The skimmer is not yet totally broken in. The collection cup is all the way up and it's still skimming wet. I'm thinking I made a mistake and got a skimmer too large for my system.

I'm thinking I need to run the skimmer only 12 hours a day, or maybe take it offline entirely. I also do 20% weekly water changes, which I'm lowering to 10%. Along with that I'm blasting all the dinos with a turkey baster daily.

Any other tips to prevent these dinos? My tank is an AIO IM nuvo 40

 

[John Bolden]

Some tanks you can do instant cycle with seeded rocks, sponges bio balls, etc...

 

[mjw011689]

First, what kind of rock did you start with and how old is the tank? Was it dry rock?

It took about a month or so of dosing neophos before I started getting a reading. Finally once I did, I started getting fluctuations based on what I fed. The days I fed frozen it would climb anywhere from .02-.06ish. But the days I fed flake it would drop back down. Finally got to the point where every third day is frozen and it’s staying in that .01 to .03 range. Once I got that, I killed the white light completely, and ran blue for only 5 hours a day. After about 3 weeks it was completely gone. What’s funny is my euphyllia are actually growing much faster since then, probably because they use up some phosphate. Got 3 new heads on multiples just during that 3 week blue period.

There are definitely more aggressive ways, but this one didn’t require me to spend the money on a UV and I didn’t have to do any harsh chemicals. If you have a sump, on thing that helps is to take a thin tube (like less than half inch inside diameter) and siphon as much as possible into the filter sock while all the pumps are still running. That knocked out a ton of the chunky stuff. Then just clean out the sock.

 

[CRABDADDY]

I should have added that that my tank is over 2 years old, well established, and corals are doing well.

 

[CRABDADDY]

Perhaps I just need to give the neophos more time then. On the bottle it recommends to test again after 24 hours, but I never see a change when I do that. It usually still ends up at 0.0.

 

[mjw011689]

I ended up testing phosphate daily for over a month to figure out all the trends. Went through a crapload of reagent for my Hanna checker but oh well

 

[mjw011689]

Are you running anything like phosban or gfo that would remove phosphate? Any chaeto or algae scrubber?

 

[CRABDADDY]

Are you running anything like phosban or gfo that would remove phosphate? Any chaeto or algae scrubber?

I'm not running anything like that. There's almost no algae in the tank. My only filtration is filter pads, rock, chemipure blue, and my skimmer.

I have been testing daily, it just seems to sit at 0. Last week I was able to get a reading for a few days before it dropped again.

 

[mjw011689]

Chemipure blue RAPIDLY reduces phosphates. Their words, not mine. That could be why you are at zero right there

 

[CRABDADDY]

Chemipure blue RAPIDLY reduces phosphates. Their words, not mine. That could be why you are at zero right there

Good catch. I didn't realize that. I've been running it for a long time, but never had an issue. I'll probably remove it for now, at least until phosphates increase and stabilize.

 

[mjw011689]

It was probably helping for the longest time. You probably had high phosphates that it was keeping in check, now they’re just depleted. Probably one of those products that requires testing when using

 

[CRABDADDY]

Removing the chemipure worked to allow phosphates to increase. I was at 0.12 today when I tested. Higher than I'd like, but definitely better than 0.

Dinos are getting worse today though. Starting to see them on the rocks and all over frag racks.

I'm thinking of starting a blackout before it gets worse. I really don't want to do that because I have a bunch of acros in the tank that are just getting finished settling in... But I'm thinking it may be best to rip the band-aid off before it turns into a full on outbreak.

I'm planning on dosing microbacter 7 daily and running a cheap uv sterilizer (not sure if this will even do anything).

Any advice on how long to black out the tank for? Or other options? I really don't want to let this progress into something that is completely out of control.

 

[mjw011689]

Wow that was a fast turnaround just by removing the chemipure. I guess that stuff works pretty good after all.

As for the blackout, I’ve heard of people doing like a 3-5 day total blackout with like cardboard around the tank. I didn’t want to go that extreme so I just turned off all white light and went blues only for like 5 hours a day. Took a couple weeks but it was all gone and all the coral seemed to be perfectly fine.

 

[CRABDADDY]

I did dose 5mls of neo phos, fed pellets and reef roids yesterday mostly because I didn't expect it to shoot up that quickly.

Did you have a full on outbreak, or was it just some here and there?

 

[mjw011689]

Mine was an extreme case. To the point it was chunky even. I’ll see if I have any photos, but it was the entire sand and rock work that was covered. Had to remove from corals daily

 

[CRABDADDY]

Hmm, ok. I'm thinking maybe reducing the lights like you did may be better for my corals than a complete blackout.

Did you take any other actions to resolve your dino issue?

 

[mjw011689]

This was right AFTER a massive clean up. I siphoned off everything I could from the rock which was still brown afterwards, but at least not as thick and chunky with the dinos, and the sand is about half as bad as it was prior to the cleanup. Now the sand is back to perfect white, and the rock is actually visible and coralline has taken off. The rock is purple now that you can see it.

 

[mjw011689]

I did not. All I did was keep phosphate where it should be and nitrates low but not zero, and cut the lighting back for 2 weeks or so. I think it was 3 weeks total but the dinos were gone after 2. Wish I had a better pic of what it looked like. I was rather unmotivated to take pics of the tank during that period

 

[mjw011689]

Not my photo, but what I had very closely looked like this. And it covered everything.

 

[CRABDADDY]

Reminds me of the cyano outbreak I had about a year ago. My tank was a cyano wasteland. It took months to come back from that. But I finally did and until this last week or so, my tank was looking great.