Dinoflagelletes. How do I destroy them and are they hurting my corals?

Solarfall

Totally Gnar
My tank broke out in Dinoflagelletes pretty badly recently, I've noticed some of my corals not opening up as much since then. Is this a direct result of the Dinos, or could there be an underlying problem? My inverts are all fine, and my only fish is in the QT right now. My params are all perfect too, so I'm thinking a possible coral parasite. But it's not all the corals, either.
I have a Hammer, a plate, an acro, 2 different colonies of zoos, a small acan frag, and a leather. Out of those only the Hammer, one of the zoo colonies, and the acans seem to be having problems.


Also, I've looked around a little for answers on how to kill them, but I never find anything really helpful. I keep finding answers that are really just maybes.

So what would you guys do?
 
Well, I had an outbreak earlier this year. What I did was do a 10-20% water change weekly, after manually removing as much as I could by hand. The underlaying problem is excess nutrients. So the water changes help with that and the manual removal helps keep the population in check. It really took months and months and months to get it under control

Hope you a speedy recovery:Cheers:
 
My nitrates are 0 ppm right now though.

I think they came over on a coral I bought recently, but do they directly damage corals?
 
dinos are more from low nutrient systems. and they are a pain to get rid of

and they can and will cover and kill corals
 
The link isn't working for me, fast.

But I read around last night and saw that a common fix for dinos was to remove your current sand bed.

So what I did was just turn the top 1/4" or so surface of my sand up and essentially "smothered" the dinos in the sand.

Usually I would wake up and the tank would be covered. After doing that last night, I see virtually no dinos.
 
The dinos were back when I came home from work today. I'm guessing since they didn't break out over night, they are a photosynthetic type. So I've reduced my photoperiod to 5 hours starting tomorrow.

Also tomorrow I think I'll take all my rocks out and scrub off as much of them as possible manually, and do like a 20g water change in the process. And I'll use my battery operated gravel vac to get as much out of the sandbed as possible.

If I don't see any progress with that, I'll try raising the PH, although I'm not totally sure how.
 
Heres how I got rid Dinos.
The first thing I did was a 50% water change,siphoning out as much of the Dions as possible.Then I killed the lights and covered the tank so that no light could get in.
The next thing,is I started dripping kalkwasser and ran the PH up to 8.5-8.6.
I left the tank blacked out for a little over 2 full weeks.And if that hadnt of worked,I had a gallon of bleach that was going in next.
 
I have to agree with what Yote did. I'm also going to agree with you on them being photosynthetic. Let's pray they're not the parasitic type anyway.

In order to kill something, you must know what it thrives on...in this case, light. I'm going to go out on a limb and say light restriction and water changes will be your best bet. And bleach would probably be your worst. Sorry Yote. Rofl.

Here are some links that might be useful:
BL Web: Growing dinoflagellates at home
All About Dinoflagellates
Introduction to the Dinoflagellata
 
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