I recommend a test before upscaling work to the entire system. Pull a test rock out of the tank and use a steak knife outside the tank to scrape out the invader from its roots on half the rock.
It's not typical scrubbing like with a brush, It's scarring a bit of the rock like a parrotfish bite which dislodges both the holdfast and the plant body. Work a section totally clean by knifing and saltwater rinsing.
When that half is algae free due to metal, use 3% peroxide on the cleaned area, as a leftovers burn. Let sit four mins outside tank, rinse off, done with that section.
The other half of the test rock: don't score anything just put peroxide 3% from a brand new, not aged, bottle right on the algae let it sit four minutes. Rinse, put back with its algae in place.
We take no action for a couple days to see how each side behaves. Both sides will likely die out, it's the growback we're charting.
Algae tufts are detritus mops. Even if a system tests clean water, algae has bits of detritus for on site degradation inside the mop. To kill the aggregate mass is to ruin it's adapted feed source along with our cheat system which both removes holdfasts and burns them.
Once cleaned and pores opened back up, that lr filtration ability improves massively and it can begin to express back out any stored up wastes within.
Algae can grow in balanced systems if simply allowed to. A grazer exists for every condition, when it can't be found quickly we can cheat the algae out till then.
This is just to build a clean palette for re beginning. Methods of nutrient balance are directly worth considering once self support is removed in my opinion.
The test tells us if your invader is abnormally strong or rooted. In all fairness it's helpful to ensure topoff water is clean/acceptable so we work less on gardening.
The pics so far didn't strike me as a terribly high bioload setup, just grazerless.
Clearly a larger tank doesn't want to run teeth cleaning dentistry on eighty pounds of rock. It's what we might consider though for eighty pounds of rock when only one has the invader, vs letting it take over. No rooted invader can resist this, we use 35% in ultra rare cases hardly ever needed.
Our way is work heavy, and not as ideal to a fine balance in the tank handling our issues. for anyone lacking that ideal balance, use raw work to be invader free until you get there.
