Hello all,
I have recently (within the past few weeks) began noticing dinos in my tank. I've had dinos before, so I'm pretty positive that's what they are. They are long stringy/slimy rust colored strands on my rockwork. I will add a few pictures when I get home from work.
My system has been up for about 15 months, it's a lps dominant 125 gallon tank with a 40 gallon sump. It's a bare-bottom no substrate, and the dinos don't seem to go away at night. I have been manually removing everything that I can get off of the rocks during weekly water changes. About a month ago I started paying much closer attention to the tank and started tracking all nutrients frequently.
Current Parameters (checked with red sea/salifert test kits):
Phosphate: 0.1ppm
Nitrate: 30 ppm
Alk: 8.0 dKh
Calc: 420 ppm
Mag: 1440 ppm
Sal: 1.026
Over the past month I have been bringing down nitrates and phosphates as they were at 50+ ppm and 0.5-1.0 ppm phosphate (I know extremely high). Which is why I thought it was weird that I'm showing dinos when I thought they thrived in a low nutrient environment, which mine is far from. Any ideas of how to tackle this problem?
Other info:
Started carbon dosing a week ago to lower nitrate and phosphate.
I just cleaned my skimmer and have it wet skimming and dumping that daily.
I have a fairly well stocked tanked with fish (3 tangs, 2 clowns, coral beauty, and 3 anthias) which I feed pellets and mysis daily with selcon dipped nori a couple times a week.
I run 3 ai primes, about a 10 hour light mostly blue/daylight spectrum
I also have change filter socks 2x weekly now, as well as have a cheaper UV sterilizer in my sump.
I run carbon media, purigen, and recently but since stopped GFO
Any advice is appreciated, thank you!
I have recently (within the past few weeks) began noticing dinos in my tank. I've had dinos before, so I'm pretty positive that's what they are. They are long stringy/slimy rust colored strands on my rockwork. I will add a few pictures when I get home from work.
My system has been up for about 15 months, it's a lps dominant 125 gallon tank with a 40 gallon sump. It's a bare-bottom no substrate, and the dinos don't seem to go away at night. I have been manually removing everything that I can get off of the rocks during weekly water changes. About a month ago I started paying much closer attention to the tank and started tracking all nutrients frequently.
Current Parameters (checked with red sea/salifert test kits):
Phosphate: 0.1ppm
Nitrate: 30 ppm
Alk: 8.0 dKh
Calc: 420 ppm
Mag: 1440 ppm
Sal: 1.026
Over the past month I have been bringing down nitrates and phosphates as they were at 50+ ppm and 0.5-1.0 ppm phosphate (I know extremely high). Which is why I thought it was weird that I'm showing dinos when I thought they thrived in a low nutrient environment, which mine is far from. Any ideas of how to tackle this problem?
Other info:
Started carbon dosing a week ago to lower nitrate and phosphate.
I just cleaned my skimmer and have it wet skimming and dumping that daily.
I have a fairly well stocked tanked with fish (3 tangs, 2 clowns, coral beauty, and 3 anthias) which I feed pellets and mysis daily with selcon dipped nori a couple times a week.
I run 3 ai primes, about a 10 hour light mostly blue/daylight spectrum
I also have change filter socks 2x weekly now, as well as have a cheaper UV sterilizer in my sump.
I run carbon media, purigen, and recently but since stopped GFO
Any advice is appreciated, thank you!
