sneeyatch
Active member
I have noticed a lot of folks fighting dino's lately and I thought I would make this thread telling people how I got rid of them instead of posting the info (a lot of info) through so many different threads. I don't have pictures as this fight happened a couple of years ago, but I will try to be as descriptive as possible.
If you don't want to read my story, you can skip down to the bottom
Keep in mind in my 10+ years in the hobby, I've never dealt with this before and I hope I never will again.
I had them nasty bad when I had my 150 DD set-up, they were so thick and brown, slimy and literally everywhere. Once I finally figured out what they were, I was so infested with them that I had a large fight on my hands. Anyway...
My tank was fairly young (6 months old or so, can't really remember) but I had some coral frags in there and some fish that although I did quarantine, apparently ich still got through. Since the reef was young and the frags were small, I decided it would be best to remove the frags and inverts I had to a small system. I decided to hypo my display, so I did. Everything went fine.
As I started increasing the salinity over the next few days and started getting things back on track, I started going through algae outbreaks (which I anticipated) and was dealing with that accordingly.
Then I started noticing what looked like brown hair algae. It was fine and a light brown color - pretty much like regular green hair algae, but less dense and of course, a light brown color. I didn't think anything of it. This was growing all over the rock and was starting to grow up through the sand in sporadic spots.
After about a week or so, the stuff growing through the sand started taking off, but the inverts I had were taking care of the stuff growing on the rock. This was mostly handled with a longspine urchin and a dolabella sp. sea hare. Nothing was taking care of the algae in the sand, so I started pulling it. I thought it was regular old hair algae like I said and still thought nothing of it.
I started seeing a cyano outbreak in certain areas of the tank - mostly on the sandbed, so I started sucking it out with water changes. it seemed to come and go, but never go away fully. It started getting slimier and growing long strands and would break off and float around in the current.
I started dosing Microbacter and vodka trying to out-compete the cyano with good bacteria and this only made matters worse. The (what I thought was) cyano basically exploded and started growing everywhere. I seriously thought this was the worse case of cyano I had ever seen. So what do I do? That's right, sucking it out with more water changes. It got worse and worse.
In my sump, I had a dual BRS reactor going with GFO and carbon and I was running an Octopus SRO-1000INT skimmer. There was no real fuge, but I did have live rock and a non-lit cryptic fuge full of sponges and things.
I started changing water more and replacing my GFO and carbon weekly. I also ran my skimmer wetter than normal. This really didn't do a whole lot.
At this point, my entire sandbed and the bottom rocks were covered in what looked like stringy caramel sauce. It was thick and had long strings waving in the current. It was gross and I still thought I was dealing with some mutant strain of cyano - mostly because I had never dealt with dino's before and it never popped in my head.
The water changes and vodka doing continued and it got worse and worse.
It was around Xmas time, I had family coming in town and of course I was embarrassed about my slime pit of a tank, so I just turned the lights off and said screw it. The tank got enough ambient light and the fish were fine - except for my sand sifting goby. It ended up dying - it obviously would not eat through the sand with slime all over it. There was really nothing I could have done. I tried catching it...
Anyway, my lights were off for what was probably around 2 weeks or so. There were no corals in there and at this point, I didn't care.
After reading and reading about what I was dealing with, I found some info on dino's and still didn't think I had them. My snails were fine and I didn't have a lot of trapped air bubbles. I figured what the hell, I'm gonna try the most aggressive remedies I can think of...
1.) I found a thread somewhere - I don't actually think it was here, where it said - DO NOT DO WATER CHANGES! That didn't make sense to me at first, but after reading some more into it, it made perfect sense. Fresh saltwater is FULL of nutrients. That's why people do them - to replace what's used up and foul so we can replenish the good nutrients. The thread made mention of it sort of like opening a window on a nice spring day. Yeah, you replace the air in the house, but you also let in the "nutrients" from outside - good or bad... like pollen, dust, exhaust from vehicles going by, etc.
I started sucking out all of the dino's I could see with a small diameter airline so I could really get in the nooks and crannies while not sucking all the water out of the tank.
Since water changes were out of the question, I set up a couple of 5 gallon buckets with fine filter socks. I sucked the dino's into the filter socks in the buckets and when the buckets were full enough of water, I simply dumped the "filtered" water back in my sump. Sure - some of the dino's do get through but nothing compared to whatt was coming out.
I did this DAILY - and at the height of their growth cycle in the day - not when they're knocked back already at night or anything either.
2.) I tried raising my pH to 8.6 - and I did (off and on) but I couldn't consistently keep it elevated. ALL of my top-off was with Kalk and I was trying everything to raise it and keep it up, but just couldn't. So - Try this and try to keep it there if you can, it may help, but I can't speak for this.
3.) Of course, I cranked my skimmer to run as wet as it could and have it still be somewhat productive instead of it just overflowing everywhere. I had it set so that I had to dump it once a day - regardless of what color the skimmate was.
4.) I changed my GFO and carbon weekly and my dual BRS reactor was packed as much as I could fill it.
5.) Carbon dosing (vodka or whatever else you use) is STOPPED. Dino's easily use carbon as a food source and they laugh at you when you give it to them.
6.) Lights out for as long as you can take it. Days on end. Know you WILL more than likely lose some of your corals. If you're stressing that, then remove them (physically cut them off so there is no rock or anything being transferred). Coral ONLY, you don't want to QT your corals only to re-introduce dino's back into your display after you just beat them.
By lights out - I mean lights out. Cover as much of your tank as you can with an opaque barrier of some type. I had a lot of cardboard laying around so I wrapped the entire tank with it and taped a black plastic trash bag over the top of the tank.
I was fortunate that I didn't have corals in the tank when I did this and if you can QT them while dealing with dino's then I would do so.
7.) I happened to be running a UV at the time as well - I figured it couldn't hurt. Don't know if it helped or not, maybe it did.
8.) Peroxide dosing. I personally think that this was probably the thing that killed the majority of it. Peroxide dosage is 1ml per 10 net gallons if you plan on doing it. It reacts extremely fast with water and the 3rd oxygen atom in peroxide oxidizes the water. How much exactly? Not sure. I didn't care at the time. I followed the recommended dosage amounts every day and I was able to see daily results after about a week in to using it.
9.) Hardly any feeding. Make your fish starve it out for a while. Sounds mean, but they'll be fine. I think I ended up feeding my fish maybe twice a week and that was it. I'm sure they weren't happy with me, but they got over it.
In addition to feeding as sparingly as possible - use pellets, or strain and rinse your frozen foods to make sure you don't introduce any slurry or anything into the water column. I would literally just throw a few pellets in there at a time and if ANYTHING was missed, I stopped feeding.
After about 2 - 3 weeks, I was totally gaining the upper hand.
My last and final nail in the coffin was I sucked at least the top 1/4" or more of the sand bed out and trashed it.
After a couple more days of lights out, I started back with my normal photoperiod and it never came back.
I think there is a lot of info out there about combating dino's, but it's all over the place. It would be great to have all of the experiences under a single thread so folks can rely on a single, good thread.
Dino's are nasty and a lot of folks tear their tanks down due to them. I hope my info helps. If you guys have any questions about anything, or if I seemed to have missed something - or if you want to add anything FROM EXPERIENCE, please do so. I'm not looking to have this thread become a source of myths for dealing with them - but one of experiences.
If you don't want to read my story, you can skip down to the bottom
Keep in mind in my 10+ years in the hobby, I've never dealt with this before and I hope I never will again.
I had them nasty bad when I had my 150 DD set-up, they were so thick and brown, slimy and literally everywhere. Once I finally figured out what they were, I was so infested with them that I had a large fight on my hands. Anyway...
My tank was fairly young (6 months old or so, can't really remember) but I had some coral frags in there and some fish that although I did quarantine, apparently ich still got through. Since the reef was young and the frags were small, I decided it would be best to remove the frags and inverts I had to a small system. I decided to hypo my display, so I did. Everything went fine.
As I started increasing the salinity over the next few days and started getting things back on track, I started going through algae outbreaks (which I anticipated) and was dealing with that accordingly.
Then I started noticing what looked like brown hair algae. It was fine and a light brown color - pretty much like regular green hair algae, but less dense and of course, a light brown color. I didn't think anything of it. This was growing all over the rock and was starting to grow up through the sand in sporadic spots.
After about a week or so, the stuff growing through the sand started taking off, but the inverts I had were taking care of the stuff growing on the rock. This was mostly handled with a longspine urchin and a dolabella sp. sea hare. Nothing was taking care of the algae in the sand, so I started pulling it. I thought it was regular old hair algae like I said and still thought nothing of it.
I started seeing a cyano outbreak in certain areas of the tank - mostly on the sandbed, so I started sucking it out with water changes. it seemed to come and go, but never go away fully. It started getting slimier and growing long strands and would break off and float around in the current.
I started dosing Microbacter and vodka trying to out-compete the cyano with good bacteria and this only made matters worse. The (what I thought was) cyano basically exploded and started growing everywhere. I seriously thought this was the worse case of cyano I had ever seen. So what do I do? That's right, sucking it out with more water changes. It got worse and worse.
In my sump, I had a dual BRS reactor going with GFO and carbon and I was running an Octopus SRO-1000INT skimmer. There was no real fuge, but I did have live rock and a non-lit cryptic fuge full of sponges and things.
I started changing water more and replacing my GFO and carbon weekly. I also ran my skimmer wetter than normal. This really didn't do a whole lot.
At this point, my entire sandbed and the bottom rocks were covered in what looked like stringy caramel sauce. It was thick and had long strings waving in the current. It was gross and I still thought I was dealing with some mutant strain of cyano - mostly because I had never dealt with dino's before and it never popped in my head.
The water changes and vodka doing continued and it got worse and worse.
It was around Xmas time, I had family coming in town and of course I was embarrassed about my slime pit of a tank, so I just turned the lights off and said screw it. The tank got enough ambient light and the fish were fine - except for my sand sifting goby. It ended up dying - it obviously would not eat through the sand with slime all over it. There was really nothing I could have done. I tried catching it...
Anyway, my lights were off for what was probably around 2 weeks or so. There were no corals in there and at this point, I didn't care.
After reading and reading about what I was dealing with, I found some info on dino's and still didn't think I had them. My snails were fine and I didn't have a lot of trapped air bubbles. I figured what the hell, I'm gonna try the most aggressive remedies I can think of...
1.) I found a thread somewhere - I don't actually think it was here, where it said - DO NOT DO WATER CHANGES! That didn't make sense to me at first, but after reading some more into it, it made perfect sense. Fresh saltwater is FULL of nutrients. That's why people do them - to replace what's used up and foul so we can replenish the good nutrients. The thread made mention of it sort of like opening a window on a nice spring day. Yeah, you replace the air in the house, but you also let in the "nutrients" from outside - good or bad... like pollen, dust, exhaust from vehicles going by, etc.
I started sucking out all of the dino's I could see with a small diameter airline so I could really get in the nooks and crannies while not sucking all the water out of the tank.
Since water changes were out of the question, I set up a couple of 5 gallon buckets with fine filter socks. I sucked the dino's into the filter socks in the buckets and when the buckets were full enough of water, I simply dumped the "filtered" water back in my sump. Sure - some of the dino's do get through but nothing compared to whatt was coming out.
I did this DAILY - and at the height of their growth cycle in the day - not when they're knocked back already at night or anything either.
2.) I tried raising my pH to 8.6 - and I did (off and on) but I couldn't consistently keep it elevated. ALL of my top-off was with Kalk and I was trying everything to raise it and keep it up, but just couldn't. So - Try this and try to keep it there if you can, it may help, but I can't speak for this.
3.) Of course, I cranked my skimmer to run as wet as it could and have it still be somewhat productive instead of it just overflowing everywhere. I had it set so that I had to dump it once a day - regardless of what color the skimmate was.
4.) I changed my GFO and carbon weekly and my dual BRS reactor was packed as much as I could fill it.
5.) Carbon dosing (vodka or whatever else you use) is STOPPED. Dino's easily use carbon as a food source and they laugh at you when you give it to them.
6.) Lights out for as long as you can take it. Days on end. Know you WILL more than likely lose some of your corals. If you're stressing that, then remove them (physically cut them off so there is no rock or anything being transferred). Coral ONLY, you don't want to QT your corals only to re-introduce dino's back into your display after you just beat them.
By lights out - I mean lights out. Cover as much of your tank as you can with an opaque barrier of some type. I had a lot of cardboard laying around so I wrapped the entire tank with it and taped a black plastic trash bag over the top of the tank.
I was fortunate that I didn't have corals in the tank when I did this and if you can QT them while dealing with dino's then I would do so.
7.) I happened to be running a UV at the time as well - I figured it couldn't hurt. Don't know if it helped or not, maybe it did.
8.) Peroxide dosing. I personally think that this was probably the thing that killed the majority of it. Peroxide dosage is 1ml per 10 net gallons if you plan on doing it. It reacts extremely fast with water and the 3rd oxygen atom in peroxide oxidizes the water. How much exactly? Not sure. I didn't care at the time. I followed the recommended dosage amounts every day and I was able to see daily results after about a week in to using it.
9.) Hardly any feeding. Make your fish starve it out for a while. Sounds mean, but they'll be fine. I think I ended up feeding my fish maybe twice a week and that was it. I'm sure they weren't happy with me, but they got over it.
In addition to feeding as sparingly as possible - use pellets, or strain and rinse your frozen foods to make sure you don't introduce any slurry or anything into the water column. I would literally just throw a few pellets in there at a time and if ANYTHING was missed, I stopped feeding.
After about 2 - 3 weeks, I was totally gaining the upper hand.
My last and final nail in the coffin was I sucked at least the top 1/4" or more of the sand bed out and trashed it.
After a couple more days of lights out, I started back with my normal photoperiod and it never came back.
I think there is a lot of info out there about combating dino's, but it's all over the place. It would be great to have all of the experiences under a single thread so folks can rely on a single, good thread.
Dino's are nasty and a lot of folks tear their tanks down due to them. I hope my info helps. If you guys have any questions about anything, or if I seemed to have missed something - or if you want to add anything FROM EXPERIENCE, please do so. I'm not looking to have this thread become a source of myths for dealing with them - but one of experiences.
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