Long story short, in early April I decided to pull the GFO and try vodka and Microbacter7 dosing. I dosed for about 6 weeks. I built up slowly, and followed the "famous dosing schedule" and I managed to slowly brown out all my SPS by about 99% and near the end of the 6 weeks I lost half a dozen small pieces. I was quite stubborn about making it work.
When I started losing pieces in early May I quit dosing the vodka and MB7, and went back to the trusty GFO and Prodibio dosing in mid-May. I've had good luck with Prodibio before. So, now I'm starting to get some color back, but the tank still looks like poop. So much for experiments. Argh.
When I did the vodka dosing, most of the SPS went brown, but some of them bleached out. The ones that I lost were ones that bleached. Two of my favourite colonies were two of the pieces that bleached and when they started to RTN at the base that's when I threw in the towel on the vodka + MB7. I found a pic I took of the one colonies:
This is what it looks like in its prime:
Also, in the beginning of March I moved most of my LPS out of the 90 and into the new 50. In the process I basically pilfered the 90 and it looked a bit barren. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of how bad it looked. Between the tank looking awful, and me killing my main camera in Hawaii in May I haven't taken many pics since.
Here it was halfway browned out, partway through the vodka dosing. When I pilfered the corals out, I took almost all the rock out of the right hand side of the tank, so it was quite bare looking.
So, Canada Day weekend I moved the last of the LPS and Gorgonians out of the 90 and put about 40 lbs of live rock into the 90 to fluff it back up. Finally, after 18 months of putting it off, the tank doesn't have a million corals on the sand! It still needs A LOT more color to develop back again, but here is how it looked shortly after the re-aquascaping on June 30th...
