Sun Coral Fragging

Fragmentation of the sun corals was done at least by several people (you can see them throught the web search), but not always the outcome or a process were mentioned. Here are links to the most informative sources:

My attempt of fragging a sun coral:

Why, when, how to and how not to

1. Why:

All imaginable reasons:

  • Stopping necrosis - dying colony.
  • Aesthetic reasons - colony with a lot of dead parts.
  • Aquaculturing - making several colonies from one.
  • Too big colony, overgrown available space.

The last was a my reason: my tubastrea covered its rock, started to grow at the bottom part of it, it was impossible to feed the polyps on the bottom, and they became torn after the colony was repeatedly moved by clean-up crew and during the tank cleaning. The same colony, we are talking about on these sun coral pages. It progressed on the usual twice a week feedings during one year from - to:
Colony at arrival Size 1 yr later
Apart from taking a lot of space in 90g tank:
In 90g tank
in almost 2 yrs it had overgrown the available substrate (live rock) down to encrusting it at the bottom:
Closeup, closed Bottom view

It was already this way, when I noticed this. If I knew at the beginning about encrusting behavior of the sun coral, I would place it on the solid live rock, instead of tank's bare bottom - to provide the substrate for spreading farther.

2. When:

Before encrusting happens.

In my case, the colony on the first photo above, had to be glued onto the rock, with the left side over the steep edge - then the growth could continue unrestricted.

Right side of the coral could be on horizontal or vertical rock surface, only glued with making a tight contact of the two surfaces, then the coral's skin (coenosarc, but I'll stick with a more widely understandable terminology) couldn't grow into the gap and starts freely grow aside.

But at the time, the information about future pattern of growth wasn't available.

Or fragmentation could be done before the coral made the almost spherical colony. It is better to have the rock at the bottom, while fragging, which will accept all the impact - not the easily damagable soft tissue everywhere. Live tissue dies after such pressure.

Continue on the next page.