Dinos.... Am I crazy?

Gpettit721 · Oct 31, 2018

Good Morning,

I'll give a little background story prior to getting into the current situation. About 4 weeks ago we went through two big power outages 12 hours each and my tanks temperature dropped to 70 normally from 78 and no circulation for the tank for 12 hours ( I now have generator back). Then I went out of town and my ATO did not run the entire time i was gone. So I had three major things happen in a short time. I came home to the dreaded DINO'S!!! I went through the normal stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and then acceptance. I started to think what would be the main result of all of these things happening that would leave a gap for Dinos to take hold. I started from easiest which was my beneficial bacteria population could have been affected by the whole process especially not being sure how long my tank went with out my filtration running and o2 levels got pretty low and I don't think the tank was being fed what I normally feed. So i started adding bacteria back to the tank at pretty high doses and feeding anything and everything i could to sustain the tank. I have been doing this for about a week now and have noticed a dramatic difference from where I was when I started. There are a few patches left but its not over running that tank anymore and doesn't get worse throughout the day anymore. Could adding bacteria really have helped that much? Or just getting the system back in balance? Or did I just get lucky or getting ready to fall hard?

landlubber · Oct 31, 2018

it's hard to say exactly what is going on in there but I will say this, dinos were an issue in my tank for almost 18 months and despite employing every known tactic they were very resilient. a lot of the time people get ahead quickly with them but they are usually in cases where the strain is susceptible to a specific intervention (example: in many cases UV sterilizers are very effective for amphidinium).
it could be a case where the stars lined up and everything you did was an ideal intervention but your situation has me curious if it really was dinoflagellates to begin with. did you confirm they were Dinos under a microscope? I just wonder because its not uncommon for people to see a change in their display, latch on to a hunch and treat accordingly when it was actually diatoms all along.