<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=11684735#post11684735 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by shred5
Dino's are a pain and are the fastest growing algae I have ever seen. They can cover every inch of a reef in hours. For some reason I live in a area where Dino's are a bane in allot of peoples tanks. It might be the high amount of iron in our tap water. I had dealt with them for several years in the past, every once in a while they would creep up bad. I have talked with most experts over the years and had them taken to labs etc. Fact is they are a different puppy than any other algae and most normal things did not work at least for me.
Zooxanthellae are a type of dinoflagellate so it is safe to assume lower nutrient levels do not work. Also they are motile and the reason they spread so fast. For most people they spread so fast they crash and they never see them again but for some people they just keep going like the energizer bunny.
I had tried all the usual things like phosphate removers, water changes, ozone, uv ,raising the alk levels adding di stage to my r.o. unit and a second di stage, added a better skimmer and I will tell you this does not work. As my nutrients got lower and lower the dinos got worse and worse but I never saw any other type of algae either.. It seems they survive in much lower nutrient water than any other algae. I was to the point where there was so little phosphate in my reef that my corals were barely growing at all. You can not treat Dino’s like regular algae. For those that they do not crash on their own this is what I did. I Raised the nutrient levels some and I also add a fuge. It seems they cannot compete against macro algae for nutrients. The other algae like cheato will keep the nutrients low but require some nutrients to grow and will out compete the dino’s for those nutrients. If you lower the nutrient levels too much macro algae will stop growing and dinos will take over. I figured this out because when I first got into the hobby skimmers were rare and we used wet dry filters but it was also common to grow large amounts of Caulerpa in our reef tanks. Only till I started using bigger skimmers and we stopped keeping caulerpa in our tanks did this stuff rear its ugly head.
When I decided to get into breeding clown fish and I had brood stock tanks that were fed heavily and I did not care about algae growing in my brood stock tanks because the algae helped remove some of the nutrients. Well guess what? I never ever saw dinos in my brood stock tanks. My brood stock were also kept with a anemone so higher light was needed and I keep them just like a reef tank. Well I put two and two together and added a fuge with algae to my reef and stopped trying to keep nutrients at the lowest possible level. I never saw dino’s again and it was allot cheaper then running tons phosphate removers, oversized skimmers, uv, ozone etc.
I still occasionally use phosphate removers and still run a good skimmer though. I still keep phospahates low just not so low Macro algae stops growing.
Dave
