so what is your regime of you daily tank cleaning ? Do you have abetter photo. I can’t tell which one you have, do you have fuge or anything ? Tell us about your filtration. Let’s help you beat this thing
What are you wanting a better photo of? I've tried so many different things since January I probably can't remember it all. I successfully beat dino's in a previous tank just by raising no3/po4 to 10ppm/0.1ppm and maintaining those levels while gha grew to out compete them. This worked in the other tank, although it did take a while and had the tank looking really ugly.
So this go around I began looking for a different method. Id also like to note here that this tank was setup in August 2019, so it's fairly new. It has had a 25watt uv sterilizer on it since it was first setup.
A little back story to how i got here. I battled with low nutrients since I set the tank up. I ended up having to dose neonitro and neophos to maintain levels above 0. I knew from my last tank that low to no nutrients were a recipe for dino's, so I was trying to avoid that. During this time, I had almost nothing for a clean up crew, and very little to no algae. As the tank aged a bit, I started getting some gha. I would manually remove and it kept coming back. I decided to give vibrant a try since it is so highly recommended for gha. In hindsight, I wish I had just ramped up my clean up crew... anyway, I began dosing vibrant once per week as directed on the bottle. The gha continued to spread. Many people assured me it would work, and to just give it time. Well about 10 weeks later, work sent me out of town for a week. When I came home, I had patches of dino's, my nutrients had bottomed out to 0, and gha had exploded in growth. The tank was probably 70% covered in gha. I found this rather odd since I beat dinos by letting gha grow before, but yet here I was with loads of gha and dinos at the same time.
At that point I decided to ditch the vibrant as it clearly was not killing my gha. I manually removed everything I could. Scrubbed the rocks with a toothbrush. Siphoned the sandbed, purchased a large clean up crew, and did a 5 day black out.
Between the black out and the clean up crew/manual removal, my gha vanished completely (and has remained gone to this day). The dinos returned the next day. I began blowing them daily with a turkey baster, trying to get them into the water column so that my uv sterilizer could take them out. This didn't work at all.
During this time, I ended up with a velvet outbreak and lost all of my fish.
I decided to try h2o2 dosing. I started with 3% from walmart. Dosed it at 3ml/10g every 12hrs. I did this for about a week with 0 results. Since there was no fish, I removed the handful of corals and placed them into qt. I then dosed 12ml/10g every 12hrs for 3 days. I had almost instant results. The dino's were almost completely gone, my skimmer was full of nasty brown skimmate, I felt really good about these results. So with no fish, and no coral, I wrapped the tank completely blacked out for the next 9 days, while I continued to dose the h2o2. When I unwrapped the tank, it was absolutely pristine. I monitored the tank over the next week and it remained perfect. I stayed on top of keeping nutrients levels in check. No3 5-10ppm, po4 at 0.04-0.08ppm. I was feeling very confident I had beat them. I transferred all my coral back over. But alas, around 13-14 days after unwrapping, I began to see them again.
I then decided to try the elegant corals dino regimen. This also seemed to work, yet again, around the 1.5-2wk mark after being dino free, they were back again.
I began siphoning the sand, filtering through 2 socks, and pumping the water through my uv sterilizer before putting it back into the tank. I did this every other day for about 2 weeks. They continue to show up 48hrs after siphoning.
So then I decided to try h2o2 again, but got 34% food grade instead of the regular stuff. I dosed 1ml/10g every 12hrs using that, and while it absolutely slows their growth, it has not killed them off. During this time I continued siphoning the sand, hoping that this would get them suspended into the water where the h2o2 would have a better chance at killing them. This has proven to be ineffective. The h2o2 appears to no longer affect them as it did before.
I then started using a long pipette to target them with h2o2 directly. This works for sure, but they seem to spread faster than I can target them. I can only put so much h2o2 into the tank before my corals get really stressed. I tried diluting the h2o2 in a small cup of tank water to give me more volume to work with, but then it is less effective.
That brought me to the tank temp method I am currently trying.
I will also note that i do have a fuge with chaeto in hopes that it would outcompete, it hasn't helped. I also have been dosing microbacter7 every single day for the last 4 months or so as well as microbacter clean. And I have dosed other bottled bacteria in hopes of outcompeting the dino's.
To be honest, I'm probably forgetting some stuff, and I may even have the order of some things crossed up, its hard to remember it all.
Through this time they have remained on my sandbed. They briefly went onto the rocks in one spot around a month ago. I spot treated that are with h2o2 and they have not left the sand since then.
Oh yeah I just remembered someone mentioned to me that straight ro/di will kill dinos, so I tried using a pipette and targeting them with ro/di, that didn't do anything either.
I am scared to try dinox as I hear lots of horror stories. Keeping that as a last resort. I really do not want to kill my coral.
www.reef2reef.com
