I dealt with this, and I believe when Borneman had a forum here, thats where the discussion was, because I was unable to determine if what I had was actually dinoflagellets or merely cyano. The kicker in deciding it was dinoflagellets came about when, in the mornings it would be gone, without a trace, but a few hours after the lights were on, it was everwhere, also the collection of the bubbles of snot at the surface.
We fortunately had a seperate tank that we could move "all" of the corals too. I say "all" because some got left behind, but oddly enough they seemed to suffer no adverse effects of the 'treatment'.
The treatment was a combination of about 3 days worth of research into the matter of dinoflagellets. We've battled cyano, and oddly enough the treatment is much the same with a few additions.
First off, we kicked the flow up. Part of our problem was extremely low flow (<10x turnover, which was something we really hadn't though about, which was a very newbie mistake) We bumped it to about 25x, and even now we're planning on getting it to ~40x in the near future. Secondly, feedings were cut drastically. Turns out that we were feeding an extreme amount of food to the tank. Its hard to determine what is overfeeding, but if you compare then to what we feed now, it was probably 10-20 times as much, and our fish are still happy and healthy, so I know were not underfeeding.
The oddest thing I learned through my research is that doing waterchanges to treat dinoflagellets will likely cause the symptoms to worsen as they have a fresh bout of nutrients from the water change water to feed off of. But aside from that, you want to be removing as many nutrients as possible. If you have a skimmer, skim wet. If you have a vegetable fuge, make sure you've got lots of light over it to help encourage the growth of the macros to hopefully help choke out the dinoflagellets. The odd thing is that doing this will not, at least in my experience, get rid of dinoflagellets, at least alone. The kicker was that we blacked the tank out for 5 days. For 5 days the tank stood in pitch black darkness. We wrapped the 150 with cloth to block out any light from entering the tank for the first 2 days and after that, the lights remained off. For the next week, we ran the actinics and halides for only an hour. The following week it was increased to 2 hours, and the third week 3 hours. After the 4th week, we were free and clear and back up to a normal photoperiod of 10 hours (8 hours of halides). We've been free of the infestation since then. Here's some pictures to give you an idea in a before and after fashion:
And heres an after. Notice the absence of corals? We moved most of them to the frag tank, and about three weeks after we were back to full photoperiod we moved them back.
This is a heck of a battle to fight, and in my research I found that many people get out of the hobby due to it, or at the very least break their system down and start over with new live rock/sand, but after having made the inital investment for approximately 120lbs of live rock, that simply wasnt an option given that it had only been 4-5 months since we had the majority of the rock. Breaking the system down to start over was only going to be an option should we lose the battle with this stuff, and we didnt. Good luck!
