I have what I think is a small dino problem (so far) in my peninsula 25g. Microscope ID was giving me trouble as the cells didn't look like the obvious ones I see in the dino guide. It is only on my sand. I also have had diatoms on the sand for a month or two that haven't really bothered me, until the other day. I decided to vacuum up a bunch of the diatoms off the sand during a water change, stir a little sand, and baste up some more the following day. Guess what took their place? Something not so rusty looking that disappears at night...
Sometimes I think it better to let sleeping dogs lie! Now I am battling the dinos which are uglier, potentially toxic, and likely harder to battle. I lost a small setosa frag this week. Maybe related to the dinos, maybe related to the 5% light increase I made. Not sure which. Everything else seems fine. I dosed some peroxide last night after they went into the water column, and added some filter floss in the AIO chamber to collect as much as possible. Today looked better than yesterday. I will stop the AB+ dosing, increase phyto I already doese, and keep with the peroxide/filterfloss at night. If that doesn't slow it down, I will consider UV. I will say my nitrates have been a steady 5 ppm for months. My phos has been .01 ppm since I recently started testing a few weeks ago.
I was also already considering adding a couple pounds of live rock and some live sand from someone like tampa bay saltwater to increase biodiversity. I miss the old days of having all the critters in the tank do the hard work, and kind regret doing the dry rock method this go around! This might be another good reason to grab some proper LR and LS.
