Alexander1312
Supporting Member
Some reflections on why I (probably) got Dinos in the beginning
As many others, and despite the use of live rocks and several other measures to start off with a strong biome (confirmed by an Aquabiomics test which showed a 90/90 score after 30 days), I got Dinos after approx three months of setting up this tank.
Happy to hear other thoughts or disagreements, but getting Dinos early on seems to be such a common problem and in many cases very difficult to resolve in a reasonable time, that I wanted to learn from this problem more than I thought I did previously, and document these thoughts of potential reasons.
The Dino topic seems to be a rare topic where even experienced reefers do not have a strong response to as this appeared to be a more ‘recent’ pervasive occurrence in reef tank and folks did not have this as much in the past when they started, or they were able to resolve this with a bit of UV and blackouts when it did come up.
As many others, and despite the use of live rocks and several other measures to start off with a strong biome (confirmed by an Aquabiomics test which showed a 90/90 score after 30 days), I got Dinos after approx three months of setting up this tank.
Happy to hear other thoughts or disagreements, but getting Dinos early on seems to be such a common problem and in many cases very difficult to resolve in a reasonable time, that I wanted to learn from this problem more than I thought I did previously, and document these thoughts of potential reasons.
The Dino topic seems to be a rare topic where even experienced reefers do not have a strong response to as this appeared to be a more ‘recent’ pervasive occurrence in reef tank and folks did not have this as much in the past when they started, or they were able to resolve this with a bit of UV and blackouts when it did come up.
- Allowing low nutrient levels to persist for several weeks: I knew the tank was too clean in the beginning, but it looked visually good and it was hard to convince myself to make it dirtier intentionally. Also, testing errors or accuracy ranges with test kit could mean that my actual values might have been even lower than measured, specifically phosphate, possibly at 0 at times.
- What would I do differently next time? Getting both nitrate and phosphate up to at least 10 and 0.1 ASAP would be my main objective to potentially and reasonably protect myself against Dinos early on. This might come at a cost of other algae growth, but it would be still easier to resolve than them (although some say GHA is worse than Dinos, and I partially agree).
- Starting up a refugium from ‘Day 1’: This is a tough one as I really liked the idea and purpose of a refugium. I did this for biome purposes, not for nutrient management. I liked to have a dedicated area in the sump to which I could add copepods, apmhipods, other critters, and I thought the cheato anyway needed time to grow. I had the light down there at 12 hours daily which was probably just too long.
- What would I do differently next time? Setting up a refugium without cheato in the beginning could be a compromise, to add all the critters etc, but not having the nutrient export early on. Only when I see nutrients at minimum levels as I had mentioned above staying consistently or even increasing beyond that would be the time for me to start growing chaeto.
- Watching the power of my skimmer and utilize lower settings: I do not believe my skimmer is not overpowered, but I was running it at ‘regular’ levels early on. In hindsight, this seemed to not make sense but I am chasing PH, and this was something I thought I wanted to do and did not like the idea of the skimmer to running at lower levels and lower its impact on PH contribution.
- What would I do differently next time? Starting the skimmer at the lowest setting and see where nutrients will go. Similar to the refugium, slowly increasing its power when I feel I crossed the minimum threshold where I believe nutrients will not go lower than I wanted to be. Also, I started the tank in December when windows were closed and CO2 levels were higher, actually adding to the issue of lower PH with skimmer settings being high, adding more high CO2 into the tank - still I thought keeping the skimmer setting higher would help. To get a good PH early on, I would use a CO2 scrubber from the start, setting the skimmer at the lowest setting. This would result in a desired PH if chasing PH is my objective.
- Adding trace elements (wrongly) too early: I moved my gonies and several other corals over from the nano tank where they had been doing very well. So I was (very) concerned that the new tank would mess them up, and I wanted to make sure the traces were aligned with what I had in the nano tank. I used the Reef Blueprint (Captiv8) ISOL MT all in one solution for this at its recommended value from the beginning. This is generally good product if you know what it does and what it does not. For starters, it is not complete, and it misses several trace elements and focuses only on some. It is also rather strong, so overdosing even if staying at the recommended value is rather likely. As the theory with dinos is that traces are out of balance, in addition to low nutrient levels, ISOL MT is at high risk to contribute to the issue how it is designed.
- What would I do differently next time? Not dosing trace elements in the beginning would feel uncomfortable to me, but I assume this is what most would recommend in response to reading the above. If ISOL MT is used, I would use a third of the recommended value in the beginning, and see how it plays out on the ICP. Also, I would probably not use this product anymore given it is incomplete. If I was to start over, I would go with an alternative approach for dosing traces. I will switch to Balling light from Fauna Marin (fanboy) - see future post - and their approach is to start with a trace element supply at the lowest level and require measuring consumption of major traces to determine how minor traces need to dosed. Also, their focus is on keeping traces in balance vs actual values. Both should certainly help with overdosing traces in beginning and getting imbalances potentially contributing to algae and/or Dino issues.
