cyphastria encrusting "strength"

Trever

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Having never grown coral in my life, I'm trying to plan ahead a bit and I have what feels like a very newbie question, but no one really explains these basic things so here goes...

I plan to grow a fair amount of encrusting cyphastria (meteor shower, bizzaro, jingle bells). I'm assuming cyphastria can encrust up and down a "rock wall", where the wall is actually several pieces of rock piled on top of each other, kind of like bricks on a house but has more crevices and not as smooth and even.

If this assumption is correct, will the cyphastria "cement" the wall together, effectively? Will the wall become sorta like one giant rock?

(1) My rock is pukani, which clearly seems to be dead coral from some number of ages ago.
(2) I saw a video of someone fragging cyphastria using one of those powered frag saws (like my LFS has), the cyphastria seemed to be like plates of rock that had to be cut with the saw.

Putting one and two together, I'm thinking the cyphastria encrusting will be strong and become relatively indistinguishable from a large wall, where the "wall" is made of a single piece of brick in the end- a brick made up of cyphastria. In other words, instead of brick and mortar, some day, my "wall" will be like one giant brick (or, if you prefer, like one giant sheet of mortar, where in this case the mortar is cyphastria).

Is my thinking basically correct? How strong is cyphastria's "plating"?

Thanks

P.S. I'm not crossing my fingers that my initial "wall" of pukani doesn't fall over until the cyphastria encrusts it. I do have it held together. But for various reasons, I am wondering how cyphastria will grow out here.
 

rapid

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Yes the coral will encrust it’s into one big rock could potentially still fall for it will take a while to encrust a giant wall
 

User

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The encrustation will be fairly superficial- maybe 2-3 mm thick at growth fronts, 3-5 mm more established.

A good pull and twist will break it and release the rocks however. Too much for fish to bump the rocks off, but not sir strong you would be able to lift several rocks out at once unsupported

I do the same thing. I hate plugs and tiles in my display so all my encrusting corals start out on rock rubble and I move it into the main structure once it’s a bit established
 
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