currently dealing with bad aiptasia issue and im getting aggravated with the countless obstacles that i keep discovering through more research, i feel confused and helpless... and this reminds me of when i had dinos. when i had dinos i was devastated and spent most of my days just reading about eradication methods. i started to see a pattern that for every proposed solution there are 100 people that say it doesnt work or it makes it much worse. i understand that in this hobby everyones experience can be different, but my god this was the most aggravating experience with a hobby ive ever had and probably ever will have. i had dinos for a few months, tried just about everything and finally got rid of it. i will explain how and mention every method i tried along the way. hopefully this doesnt turn into another thread where someone tries what i did with zero results, but if you have dinos and feel helpless and aggravated, i was in your situation and this is exactly what happened.
Tank looked fantastic, but i was dealing with slightly high nitrates. put a skimmer on the tank stripped too much nutrients im guessing. within weeks i noticed some micro bubbles and strange stringy algae so i went to LFS to see whats up. for whatever reason (maybe i explained it poorly) it was recommended that i do a water change... my nitrates and phosphates were both at zero and i did about a 50% water change. little did i know the micro bubbles and strange algae i saw were dinos, and with zero nutrients in the tank - a big water change was like gas on the fire. after doing lots of research i realized it was dinos and that dinos are one of the worst things to encounter in the hobby. Heres everything i tried and my results with each method.
i started out using the chemical product "vibrant"- this some how made it much worse for me, i do not recommend vibrant for dinos at all. i was only like 9 months into the hobby and thought there could be a easy chemical fix for most stuff. thats never worked for me. i also used chemi clean because i thought maybe it was cyano (dumb i know), that didnt work either. i didnt try dino x because i didnt want to nuke my tank.
i then started doing at least a couple hours of research on forums and youtube a day, learned that its a low nutrients issue so i dosed nitrate and phosphate to maintain levels of 10 and .04... maybe this made a dent but im not really sure. im sure it didnt hurt. I remember getting EXTREMELY aggravated that some forums were split on how either very low or very high nutrients causes dinos...maybe its just any nutrient imbalance but for me it was very low nutrients that caused it IMO.
I PUT THE WHITE LIGHT ON MY SPECTRUM to ZERO (very important) and lowered the overall intensity of everything by about 10%. most importantly i started doing black outs on the tank. i would leave the lights off for 3 days at a time and when i turned them back on the dinos were gone but as i quickly learned, they just come right back. i repeated when the dinos returned. i never stopped doing this until the dinos were gone months later. maybe at this point the dinos werent quite as bad but it was still significant.
along with the blackouts, EVERY DAY i took a matt of filter floss and put it over a bucket and manually siphoned and ripped out all of the dinos from the tank into the matt and then put the water back in the tank. this was EXTREMELY annoying but looking back im sure it helped. i did this daily for atleast a couple months (easy because i had a 15 gallon tank) and it was aggravating not seeing immediate results. this is mandatory IMO.
i heard that a UV sterilizer was helpful with dinos and of course i also heard that it kills things like pods and other beneficial creatures in the tank and it might even make dinos WORSE but i was willing to give it a try. with the UV sterilizer, black outs/no white light, and daily manual removal... i was starting to see some acceptable results. the dinos were no where near total eradication but atleast i was seeing some improvement. i kept this up for probably another month until i did the next step.
i wasnt convinced that the UV was making that big of a difference and wasnt happy with all the threads saying it kills all the beneficial bacteria in the tank so i started doing more research. I read somewhere that a well stocked fuge and heavy phytoplankton dosing can help OUTCOMPETE dinos. i got two bottles of tiger pods (overkill for my tank) and some chaeto and replaced the uv sterilizer with a fuge. i used a cheap fuge light on amazon and put some porous media at the bottom of the fuge for pods to nest. I dosed phyto pretty heavily daily.
after replacing the UV with the fuge and dosing the phyto, doing daily manual removal, and doing three day black outs frequently ... within the next month or so the dinos finally started to disappear. i felt like zeus or something lol this is sadly one of the greatest moments of my life. as far as the dinos impact on my corals/livestock, during this three month period obviously everything was kinda ticked but all i lost was all of my snails
and one hammer coral i believe (bad butt gold hammer colony, i was really ticked). not sure if that's correlated but its worth mentioning.
I didnt do a water change for the next NINE MONTHS or something like that lol i was terrified of getting dinos again. i also made sure to always keep my nitrates at atleast 5 and phos atleast readable. i left my light spectrum intensity the same and after several months i started raising the white light by one percent a week.
In conclusion, if i were to get dinos again i would:
- dose nitrate (10ppm) and phos (.04ppm) to keep those levels elevated
- take white out of light spectrum, lower over all intensity, and do frequent 3 day black outs until dinos are gone
- get a fuge and dose heavily with pods and phyto (i know the fuge lowers nutrients but if youre dosing then it doesnt matter)
This is what worked for me and hopefully it can help someone else!
i vaguely understand some of the science involved in this hobby but by no means do i have an explanation for why this worked or what the components of my methods did specifically. this is what worked for me, any and all input is appreciated!
Tank looked fantastic, but i was dealing with slightly high nitrates. put a skimmer on the tank stripped too much nutrients im guessing. within weeks i noticed some micro bubbles and strange stringy algae so i went to LFS to see whats up. for whatever reason (maybe i explained it poorly) it was recommended that i do a water change... my nitrates and phosphates were both at zero and i did about a 50% water change. little did i know the micro bubbles and strange algae i saw were dinos, and with zero nutrients in the tank - a big water change was like gas on the fire. after doing lots of research i realized it was dinos and that dinos are one of the worst things to encounter in the hobby. Heres everything i tried and my results with each method.
i started out using the chemical product "vibrant"- this some how made it much worse for me, i do not recommend vibrant for dinos at all. i was only like 9 months into the hobby and thought there could be a easy chemical fix for most stuff. thats never worked for me. i also used chemi clean because i thought maybe it was cyano (dumb i know), that didnt work either. i didnt try dino x because i didnt want to nuke my tank.
i then started doing at least a couple hours of research on forums and youtube a day, learned that its a low nutrients issue so i dosed nitrate and phosphate to maintain levels of 10 and .04... maybe this made a dent but im not really sure. im sure it didnt hurt. I remember getting EXTREMELY aggravated that some forums were split on how either very low or very high nutrients causes dinos...maybe its just any nutrient imbalance but for me it was very low nutrients that caused it IMO.
I PUT THE WHITE LIGHT ON MY SPECTRUM to ZERO (very important) and lowered the overall intensity of everything by about 10%. most importantly i started doing black outs on the tank. i would leave the lights off for 3 days at a time and when i turned them back on the dinos were gone but as i quickly learned, they just come right back. i repeated when the dinos returned. i never stopped doing this until the dinos were gone months later. maybe at this point the dinos werent quite as bad but it was still significant.
along with the blackouts, EVERY DAY i took a matt of filter floss and put it over a bucket and manually siphoned and ripped out all of the dinos from the tank into the matt and then put the water back in the tank. this was EXTREMELY annoying but looking back im sure it helped. i did this daily for atleast a couple months (easy because i had a 15 gallon tank) and it was aggravating not seeing immediate results. this is mandatory IMO.
i heard that a UV sterilizer was helpful with dinos and of course i also heard that it kills things like pods and other beneficial creatures in the tank and it might even make dinos WORSE but i was willing to give it a try. with the UV sterilizer, black outs/no white light, and daily manual removal... i was starting to see some acceptable results. the dinos were no where near total eradication but atleast i was seeing some improvement. i kept this up for probably another month until i did the next step.
i wasnt convinced that the UV was making that big of a difference and wasnt happy with all the threads saying it kills all the beneficial bacteria in the tank so i started doing more research. I read somewhere that a well stocked fuge and heavy phytoplankton dosing can help OUTCOMPETE dinos. i got two bottles of tiger pods (overkill for my tank) and some chaeto and replaced the uv sterilizer with a fuge. i used a cheap fuge light on amazon and put some porous media at the bottom of the fuge for pods to nest. I dosed phyto pretty heavily daily.
after replacing the UV with the fuge and dosing the phyto, doing daily manual removal, and doing three day black outs frequently ... within the next month or so the dinos finally started to disappear. i felt like zeus or something lol this is sadly one of the greatest moments of my life. as far as the dinos impact on my corals/livestock, during this three month period obviously everything was kinda ticked but all i lost was all of my snails
and one hammer coral i believe (bad butt gold hammer colony, i was really ticked). not sure if that's correlated but its worth mentioning. I didnt do a water change for the next NINE MONTHS or something like that lol i was terrified of getting dinos again. i also made sure to always keep my nitrates at atleast 5 and phos atleast readable. i left my light spectrum intensity the same and after several months i started raising the white light by one percent a week.
In conclusion, if i were to get dinos again i would:
- dose nitrate (10ppm) and phos (.04ppm) to keep those levels elevated
- take white out of light spectrum, lower over all intensity, and do frequent 3 day black outs until dinos are gone
- get a fuge and dose heavily with pods and phyto (i know the fuge lowers nutrients but if youre dosing then it doesnt matter)
This is what worked for me and hopefully it can help someone else!
i vaguely understand some of the science involved in this hobby but by no means do i have an explanation for why this worked or what the components of my methods did specifically. this is what worked for me, any and all input is appreciated!
