Cyano or Dinoflagellates?

Picture help is here.





and





I am not good at identifying either one though, so that is about the end of my help for you. Sorry.

 

I don't know which but my tank is being overrun with it all of a sudden so misery must love company. I am trying the turkey baster approach at the moment, one rock a day.

 

Pretty sure it's dino and doing a blackout for a few days really helps - along with the turkey baster. Then shorten the daylight period after the blackout. Might be time to change your media and increase water changes.

 

agreed. easy to deal with. get some new media and pound out some 30-40% water changes. Will shape up within a few weeks for sure.

 

Lol. I personally think it looks like cyano. Every case of Dinos I've seen, they're snotty looking. Had them once.

Regardless which, the maintenance and cleaning suggestions above would take care of them in time.

 

If its dinos blackout don't work. Water changes fuel the issue. I just beat them. I ran carbon and dosed hydro

 

Also I ran a canister filter full of polishing pads also and stirred up the tank and siphoned out what I could

 

From personal experience i would say it does. So does the author of this article that i got the idea from: http://www.advancedaquarist.com/blog/how-i-beat-dinoflagellates-and-the-lessons-i-learned

That said, there are usually multiple ways to resolve any problem, but it's not true to say a blackout won't work.

 

http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-11/rhf/
One person a lot of people look for for info is Randy Holmes.

 

Looks more like cyano to me, but they could be dino's and just look different based on your flow.

Regardless, if they are dino's the information Shayna posted should help.. Especially the last part about going at it full force / not half-assing it. What seemed to be most effective to me was the combination of keeping the PH elevated (I mixed a slurry of Kalkwasser and poured it in several times a day keep it elevated around 8.5), continuously syphoning them EVERY DAY, and keeping a black sheet over the tank. Just keeping the tank lights off won't do much help.

Water changes seemed to make it worse for me.. I would syphon them into a filter sock in a bucket and then poor the filtered tank water back in.. Make sure you do the combination of ALL of these things and keep at it consistently! Each one alone didn't seem to be effective and as soon as I started slacking at keeping up with it, they would be back in full force.

 

Yes, you can start by thinking it's cyano and try the proven process. If you aren't seeing any significant change for the better within a week or so (couple large WC's), I'd be looking more toward dino's. Like was mentioned, dino's often appear like snot (stretching/stringing upward). From the pic, it appears to me more like cyano....nothing to say that it can't be both :9(