Sorry in advance for wandering here...
I am not convinced that this is dino's.....but even if it is, it might be a type you don't want to zap-now-think-later like.....symbiodinium.
That's a very real possibility – not unheard of. Espeically if your corals are bleaching or near-bleaching. PO4 starvation makes this a risk.
Without presuming these are necessarily dino's in this thread, I'd suggest checking out a different thread on dino's:
Dinoflagellates – Are You Tired Of Battling Altogether?
That 2006 article is very good...but it's from 2006.
If you look at some of the links
@mcarroll and
@taricha have posted to that "other" dino thread (4000 posts), there's a lot of new info.
A nice bunch of related links are also on my blog's
Algae section. (Blog is quicker than going through the other dino thread....which has so many "surprise endings" along the way that I think M Knight Shamalan would be jealous.)
Starvation treatments like bio-pellets, vodka dosing, et al, all seem to encourage unnatural situations to develop (even by aquarium standards) within a body of water that has a huge amount of nutrients being pumped into it on a daily basis.
To the end that "starvation"/nutrient reduction could be a useful tool at all (subject of another whole post), we're doing the "starving" from the wrong end of the equation, if you're with my thinking on this (livestock levels = feeding rates).....the problem is on the nutrient supply side in every case I've looked at....not with the tank, yet the tank gets all the treatments.
The fact that people are applying these starvation tools to
brand new tanks now – not just problem situations where there's an argument for using some tool or other to change the situation – seems to be a big factor. (Haven't read back on this whole story yet to know for sure on this case here....but that's a current trend among outbreak sufferers.)
In nature, these events are called "brown tides" "red tides" and more generally "harmful agae blooms". HAB's if you're into acronyms like I am.
The "harmful" effects which HAB's can bring are various since cyano, diatoms, dinoflagellates and more are capable of contributing to the phenomena and they occur under lots of different environmental conditions in nature.
The equation is always similar though....
some element becomes oversupplied due to an environmental disturbance causing another element to become growth-limiting – the limit (i.e. starvation) of which provokes a nasty response from some member of the tank's microbiome. oxygen, phosphorus and nitrogen limits are all known to provoke such responses....I'm sure there are others too.
