My Microfragging sps experiment.

[Donavon]

I can’t remember where i read it (maybe the link i posted)
But some say that several frags off the same colony if placed close to each other in a group will heal and grow faster than if seperated

 

[Dr.Xipoles]

Lond story short, microfragging works and is pretty amazing. GARF has some good reads, as Donavon has pointed out. I did it with gsp on a large rock and in 3 months the entire rock was covered green. The original mother colony of gsp has grown a fraction in compared to the mircofragging . I then tried it on an RR canada aussie gold frag that i had gotten where a single polyp had broken(i was going to toss in the trash) and its currently about 1 cm and encrusting nicely from 0.25 cm. about 2 months ago(had some alk issues and it survived).

 

[Baxterdawg1974]

Great investigation.
For photo documentation and later comparisons, it would be nice if you had a plastic ruler in the photos to help keep track of the growth/spread over time.

Great idea, will do that!

 

[Baxterdawg1974]

I watched the same video from the Coral Restoration facility and was surprised to hear their findings of increased growth from very small frags. I have not observed the same in my tanks. I've made "oops" frags many times and glued them to plugs only for them to stay very small for a long time. Colonies for me grow much faster than frags. I always figured it was from the increased surface area. Curious to see your results!

That is great information and it is good to know you observed the opposite. It may be that it works for some corals and not others. For me i just thought, well why not, lets see what happens. Kind of fun to play and experiment. I would imagine with all the corals you move that you get alot of small accident frags. It’s actually disappointing to hear that you didnt see something similar.

 

[Baxterdawg1974]

They call it "micro fragging" so it sounds interesting to the general public. They are actually cutting frags that are bigger than what we buy. He is just relaying the concept that a cut coral grows faster than a spawned coral. The pieces that they are cutting are pretty big compared to our "frags".

It is a misunderstanding of in terminology. Compared to a coral colony growing on a natural reef a 1-2" piece is a micro frag.

Interesting point. Thanks for clarifying that.

 

[Baxterdawg1974]

I think people are confused by the video. There is no accelerated growth in the frags from cutting them smaller. Instead of waiting for a single frag to grow into a 10" colony they are placing 10 tiny frags close together that will encrust into each other. They can place 100 frags of say Montastraea over a portion of the reef and within a year those frags will have fused together and will appear to be one large colony that may have taken 50 years to grow from an egg or a single frag.

Honestly this was what i was thinking to replicate. I realize i only cut a single small frag from the main frag, but ultimately the premise of cutting 5 or 6 micro frags may be worth while to get the process rolling quicker. I thought that since most of the frags we get, particularly the expensive frags, are small, but also as a single frag takes a while to settle in and grow.

One of the huge issues i see is that after shipping and acclimation into the tank, the frag tips tend not to grow and ‘stall’. Most of the growth is encrusting at the base. So if by doing exactly as you indicated, the seeding of multiple micro-frags together in the same vicinity, maybe it will be possible to boost not only encrusting coverage, but also trigger additional tip growth.

 

[Mrtakeoff53]

How did your experiment turn out? Do you have an update?

 

[C. Eymann]

I think people are confused by the video. There is no accelerated growth in the frags from cutting them smaller. Instead of waiting for a single frag to grow into a 10" colony they are placing 10 tiny frags close together that will encrust into each other. They can place 100 frags of say Montastraea over a portion of the reef and within a year those frags will have fused together and will appear to be one large colony that may have taken 50 years to grow from an egg or a single frag.

^^^ this

I have done this once by placing 5 or 6 small leftover nubbins from fragging that were less than 1cm² on a single disk. they fused together and started spitting off axials pretty quick.