Need help ID of brown algae (dino?) and treatment options

Q

Quicksilver

Active member
Hey Everyone, everything was going great with my new tank and I started to get these stringy brown algae coating the glass, sand, and rocks. Are these Dinoflagellates? I've tried UV sterilizer, dosing with hydrogen peroxide, turning off the lights (except for blues), running my fuge light 24/7 and nothing seems to work. I haven't had a chance to put clean up crew in and was debating on if I should now or wait until I get a handle on this. I don't want my treatment to kill my CUC. I've also been trying to raise my Ph, it's current range is 8.13-8.52. Based on what I've read about Dino the aim should to try and get it to 8.5 which I was able to today. I've also turned off the red spectrum from my lights.
First 4 pictures are with full spectrum LEDs
Last two pictures are with the white LEDs only
Under the white, it looks maybe like hair algae
 

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Yeah that looks like Hair algae. How many gallons is your tank?
Get some Turbo snails just make sure you aclimate them properly. I had trouble with hair algae, I added turbo snails and that helped tremendously. Some Scopas Tangs will destroy hair algae as well. But this will only help with your problem. You have to look at your water parameters/nutrient export, and your maintenance routine and how much your feeding of course. There are many variables in play.
 
It looks like a combo or hair algae and Dinos. Hair is easy. Cut off the PO4. Dinos are hard. I had dinos pretty bad after restarting my tank about 1.5 years ago. Killed a few $$$ acros. When I got a UV, it cleared up almost overnight. I’ve read that there are different types of dinos and UV isn’t effective of some.

That said, since you don’t have a bunch of coral, maybe just let it run it’s course. Symphony it out as much as you can. This happens most often in newer tanks.
 
Thanks guys, it's an 80 gallon tank with a 39 gallon sump. I was getting a bit of cyano and dosed with nopox and I think I zeroed out my levels and allowed the dinos to take hold. I'm going to move the UV to the display and see if that makes a difference. I'll get a clean up crew this weekend and try that. I want to try DinoX but I want to be sure beforehand. I heard that it can be rough on the tank and need to be sure this is dino or at least dino and something else.
 
If your nutrients have bottomed out yo need to raise them a bit the No4 and PO4 should not be zero. You want some trace of Nitrate and Phosphate. I did the same thing with NoPox sent all nutrients to 0 and caught dinos up the woohooo
 
I had a dino outbreak so bad from overdosing NoPox nutrients bottomed out to 0, I don't think no one had it as bad as me. The first thing is to identify which strain of Dino you have. I purchased a microscope from amazon for 15 bucks and got help identifying which strain I had so I could defeat and it works. Look at how bad I had it.
 

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Thanks Deezill, I did the same thing. Besides raising your nitrate and phosphate did you do anything else? DinoX or anything else and what did you find was the best way to remove the dino from the rock work? Any other tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
DinoX was out of stock and I got mixed reviews on it anyways. I raised my nitrates to 15 and my PO4 to .09 so that green algae would out-compete the dinos.
I also got a cheap UV from amazon 55 watt and got the slowest pump I could find which was about 300 gph. and let it run. This cleared it up. raising nutrients and the UV
you don't need to dose H2O2 you can if you want but it won't help. Please don't do NaCl like I did that will just give your powder blue tang ich and he will die. Raising the nutrients will suffice along with a UV and push slow flow into the UV. slowest you can go.
 
I haven't bought DInoX for that reason, seems like it's the last resort option and I'm almost there but not yet. I'll try and raise my levels and find a slower pump for my UV. Thanks again
 
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