Grafting / fusing palys - purple death + nuclear green

andrewkw · Apr 1, 2020

Just trying this for fun. I know it can be done. I've seen them posted before on RC like 10+ years ago. Someone on a facebook group posted one that apparently grew on it's own. If you have any tips feel free to share them. This is what I did :

I cut a few polyps in half, dried them with paper towels to remove as much slime as possible, then glued them together. I also took some frags with a lot of mat attached and glued the mats together. Obviously those ones will have to have new growth to see if it took or not.

The glued mat ones have already opened. The ones cut in half have not, but they look like they might. If they don't open by tomorrow I'll try again but this time use less glue and only glue them on the bottom and not right through the middle. I did give them iodine based dips after cutting them.

joshporksandwich · Apr 2, 2020

I did a tile with nuke greens, purple death, captain americas and beauty and the beast! let's see what happens

andrewkw · Apr 3, 2020

I think the picture speaks for itself.

andrewkw · Apr 4, 2020

I suspect these are going to be much harder to keep together but today I cut 4 different discosoma mushrooms right in the middle and glued them to tiles. After a 5 minute iodine dip replacing the water and will keep them with no flow for a bit then move to very very low flow.

Really I think I need to plumb an experiment tank into my frag system there just isn't enough room for me to try 20 or so which is probably what I need to do to ensure I get at least 1 that stays together..

Camaro Show Corals · Apr 29, 2020

andrewkw said:
I think the picture speaks for itself.

Update?

andrewkw · Apr 29, 2020

The Camaro Show said:
Update?

You can see the "good" one has developed a second mouth but they are still fused. I actually target fed for the first time the other day and it closed up and looked like one polyp again. I also have one that is about 33% green and 67% purple but it rarely opens so difficult to photograph. Then I have these frags which I just glued the mats together they are acting normal but perhaps some babies will be a mix.

AmaleeC · Apr 29, 2020

Following. Very interesting!

andrewkw · Nov 15, 2020

So almost 7 months later I'm looking at these frags. The one I physically cut and glued together has grown 2 mixed polyps along with 6+ regular polyps. But the ones I just glued at the mat have also produced a few mixed polyps see picture below:

I am thinking of cutting all the mixed polyps off and putting them on a plug and seeing what happens. Maybe eventually they will produce more or will they just continue to have regular babies with the occasional oddball? I mostly lost interest in these since I've been working on other things like raising clownfish but the frags will obviously continue to grow if I do nothing...