Right around the 4yr mark, I witnessed a very pleasant surprise in my tank - mass coral spawning!!! Was almost 11pm, went downstairs for something and walked by the tank and saw the fish going nuts, and stuff floating around everywhere. Took me a few moments to realize what was actually happening! Hard to see in the pics, but coral larvae was everywhere, rising up from the colonies.
I took a plastic cup and scooped some water out of the filter sock:
Things started to get too crowded for my liking, and larger colonies were starting to create flow and shading problems. I first removed all the caps to open things up. I like the monti caps, but they had gotten to the point of growing like weeds and causing some flow restriction on higher-end acros.
After several weeks of allowing the tank to adjust from the cap removal, the big teal stag colony near the center of the tank was next. Part of the issue here was the Birdsnest and Stag were really crowding each other, growing together. So removed the the Birdsnest first. It was pretty large itself, almost 10" across:
I then started on the Teal Stag. It was a beast and quite the PITA, but I finally got it out of there. That is a 5-gallon bucket for size reference:
I basically used a hack saw and cut the dead base off, then cut it into a few major sections. Then I remounted the two best sections, and sold/traded the rest.
My pet project - a branching mystic sunset monti. I took an old digitata skeleton and put a small chip of mystic sunset monti on the tip of each branch. Kept it in the frag tank a few months to let the tips grow down the branches. Turned out pretty nice, so mounted it in the display.