Pleased to say, looks like I have it pretty much 100% cleared up! I ended up using the Brightwell Aquatics MicroBacter Clean + Razor combo and it worked like a charm. Started noticeably working after only 24 hours or so, and I ran the dosing for 2 weeks. No casualties whatsoever other than a (Luckily cheap) Milli Acro frag that ended up melting away overnight. However, that specific frag was already not in the best shape even before treatment and had a bit of bleaching, polyp retraction, etc. so it’s hard to say whether it would have survived or not anyways even if I hadn’t run the treatment. The other Acros and most importantly all other livestock all survived, and I didn’t really notice even so much as irritation or retraction from the other corals, everything stayed pretty much normal, although it did force both of my Leathers, a Sinularia and a Toadstool, into a shed, but both finished up and came back puffier than ever. All Euphyllia are now looking gorgeous and it’s safe to say that turf growth on their skeletons was stunting polyp extension. Phosphates did bottom out a few times because the product works almost *too* well in that regard, but I had both NeoPhos and Reef Roids on hand to make sure the water never stayed nutrient depleted, which is I think where I was able to keep everything healthy. I think when people suffer losses from treatments like this, it’s not so much that the product itself directly kills anything, but that the nutrient depletion starves corals out, so you just need to stay vigilant about that aspect.
After treatment, I had a bit of what I initially thought was dinoflagellates, but I’m not a great ID on stuff like that, so I think it was actually the dying algae and other detritus accumulating and floating around, because elbow grease and manual removal has resulted in less and less of it every day. And I probably wouldn’t have had to do any manual removal if I had run filter socks instead, but what’s done is done now lol.
