Advice? Dino Transfer Between Tanks

Are you sure you need to start over ????? Here's an article I found for dealing with dinos. I've never had to do this personally, so don't know its success rate.

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/blog/how-i-beat-dinoflagellates-and-the-lessons-i-learned

 

Did you try the vibrant stuff yet?

Also in my opinion, get the rock from seascapes that's wet fiji rock. It'll save you time on the curing stuff and allow you to get up and running sooner.

When I've replaced rock or tear downs due to algae issues, I scrap all the old rock and start with new rock. Obviously you do not want to reuse your sand bed.

 

Peroxide. That's it, peroxide. 1/8 cup per 50 gallons. Run that daily for 3 weeks.

 

What I did to beet the dinos in the summer was do a restart but kept everything in the same setup.
I tried everything listed above besides vibrant to no avail.

First I drained and kept as much water as possible, this will come in handy later. I used 4 gallon buckets.
Next take all coral off rocks and set rocks outside/tossed them.

I had 4 of those buckets filled with tank water with only one having all of the coral in it. Cut all excess off corals (plugs etc)

Scrub each coral one by one and as you do this put them in the second bucket. Do this again with the third bucket and until you get to the 4th bucket.

When they are in the 4th bucket I put a heater and a is tone and they lasted in there for a week while the tank and equipment was washed with straight peroxide and left out to dry for a few days.

When I was ready to fill the tank again I dipped all of the coral in a 50/50 dip water to peroxide for one minute each coral separately.

I have a fish only tank so I had plenty of media populating to not have to fully cycle the tank or cycle at all.

The only thing I lost was a mushroom I couldn't get off of a rock.

I moved the fish I to the first bucket then second bucket as I progressed through scrubbing all the coral.

The only thing I did wrong was add another sandbed, which is now gone. I say this because of my inconsistency with cleaning it and it causing problems when I do clean it.

 

There is also some evidence of defeating dinos with elevated Mg levels (like 1800-2000 ppm). Pretty sure BRS even contributed to a thread on reefcentral on the topic. I'd think it's worth a shot.

 

Don't dip in peroxide. Peroxide is highly unstable and very damaging to tissue. It is an unbalanced compound carrying an extra oxygen that is looking to grab any other molecule to balance with such as carbon in organic tissue. What happens when you add it to the tank is that it becomes very diluted and the light forces the O out and they pair as dioxide (O2) which raises the O2 content in the water which raises the pH. This in turn kills the dinos! Light swifly breaks H2O2 down into H2O and O2. If you dip the coral then, as mentioned before, the O gets to the carbon immediately and will literally dessintagrate the tissue. When you put peroxide on cuts you notice it will turn skin white. That's your skin oxidizing. It's no longer skin.. kind of like steel to rust...