Definitely took a while to pore over this thread, but I'm certainly following along now and will add my personal experience to the mix. My dino issue began shortly after I began carbon dosing w/ Red Sea NOPOX. I started my initial dose at 0.1ml per 25 gallons (which is quite low) and what I experienced was a rather abrupt increase in my hair algae. I was told that this was the live rock leeching out the phosphates and was completely normal. So eventually when it seemed that the algae was too much to bear, I bumped the dosage to 0.25 ml per 25g.
This small bump seems to have been the catalyst for my outbreak, but fortunately I was doing daily tests of my NO3 and PO4. At 0.1ml my NO3 was undetectable, but my PO4 was still a bit elevated. Quickly I noticed that my hair algae was being covered by this brown slimy substance, but I presumed that it was just the NOPOX doing it's work, and so I slowly bumped my dosage up to 3ml per 25g. The outbreak was never really all that bad and didn't seem toxic to any of my livestock. The only thing it seems to affect are my zoas and my RBTA. In fact, I thought that I had gained the upper hand after moving my tank recently. However, after positively identifying what I had as dinos, I can now look back and see that it was only the period of darkness that put a small dent in the population (or just kept it in the water column).
Fast forward to today - I just recently put a somewhere over the rainbow frag in the tank and decided to get more aggressive with my treatment since the dinos I have tend to avoid my more established sps, but seem to like hanging around the tips of my newer frags. My first action was to reduce my NOPOX dosage down to 2ml. I noticed a near immediate uptick in the amount of dinos as they went from simply a few strands in several places to longer strands in more places with the tell-tale bubbles. So of course my reaction was to go back to 3ml; it seems like this was where some sort of weird equilibrium was reached between the organisms competing for nutrients in the tank? So once I got back to the base amount of dinos that I was used to, I upped the dosage to 4ml thinking that this should work to some extent. Strangely enough, the increase in dose had the same effect!
So today, I decided to stop dosing NOPOX altogether since I know I'm going to see a dino increase regardless of which way I go. Plus, I have Dino X showing up here in a couple days, and it's my understanding that I can't carbon dose while dosing the medication, so this should give me a couple days to see what happens before the Dino X gets here. With no dose, I do see an increase in dinos on the rocks, substrate, and a few corals, so my focus has been only to turkey baste those areas that I'm trying to protect. I figure that blowing it all into the water column is only inviting them to re-land on those sensitive areas. Fortunately, that's one strategy that has worked today! I gotta say that I'm extremely grateful that the dinos I have are not toxic!
As far as a little extra information, I've been skimming very wet the entire time. I only recently found out that my pH seems to be off the charts. I used the Red Sea test which ranges from green to dark blue...mine was royal purple, so I'm assuming that I have a pH somewhere in the range of 8.8 to 9.0, but I have an electronic probe coming in the mail, so I will have more clarity on that soon. The good thing about that is that I know that that's one treatment that has already been administered
I've decided not to do any lights out just yet because from what I've read, this only seems to be like a pause button and there doesn't seem to be any consistent results. I will lessen the photo period when I dose the Dino X, but that's about it. Hopefully, I can pick up a microscope soon and get an ID on this.
