Hello everyone,
I'm in a pickle. We've had our tank set up for over a year now. And about 2 months ago, our p04 dropped to zero and raised all kinds of problems for us. We had a Dino outbreak that we were trying to get rid of and lost some corals. We've been trying to get everything back in balance and stable.
My question to more experienced reefers is how did you overcome something similar? We've invested so much time and effort I don't want to give up but it's really frustrating losing corals or seeing things recede.
Thanks
I am not more experienced, but I feel my approach did great considering I had my entire tank evety syrface covered in them thinking it was a normal algae the pods would take out.
I dosed
nitrates daily to keep it up above 3
Phosphates 5ml 3 times a day to stay above 0
12 drops of brightwell's sponge excel silica daily
Dosed .5ml per gallon phyto (ocean magic)
Dosed 1ml per 20 gallon microbacter7 daily
Stopped water changes
Stopped dosing traces
Used felt filter sock (changed daily)
Added 8lbs of ocean rock with tons of algaes on it
Ran UV in display at lights out until lights on (a slightly oversized mean green machine)
Was scrubbing the rocks with a brush and tooth brush right at lights out for a while to remove the densist portions.
Would scrap glass with the blade side of a flipper slowly and siphoned it through into a felt filter sock in my sump.
The biggest game changer was adding the rock, i also stopped manually removing them about 2 days after its addition as I noticed some of the dinos receded some on its own for the very first time.
The rock was in the last month of this 4 month battle, everything else I was doing consistantly for 4 months.
The rock added a lot of isopods, so they may have been a big part of it, but I honestly think it was a total lack of diversity that allowed the dinos to come in once nutrients were to scarce for what else I had.
My fuge that houses chaeto, and bubble algae,never had dinos show up, but it also only has a $15 dollar
amazon grow light that is mostly red with a little blue, unlike the T5s i have on my display.
I think the idea is to do what you can to inhibit dinos, and promote all other uglies to take its place. And not only attempting to kill the dinos off.
After the dinos were out, I switched to using Tropic Marins carbon dosing methos that incorporates Plus NP to dose nitrates and phosphates along with the carbon to make the "nutrients" more available to better organisms. My corals really seem to like it, and even though it causes my nitrates to still read 0, i can tell by my PH that there is clearly nitrogen available due to what appears to be heavy photosynthesis taking place.
