boxer
Active Member
I am currently conducting a simple experiment out of curiosity. I will be posting pics later for those who would like to follow the progress. Ok heres the deal. I read some where about natural grafts that form on some acros collected from the wild, But I cant for my life find the article that I originally read. So if this sounds familiar to someone and they know where I read this please speak up. Now this has been awhile since I seen the article, but if my memory serves me right I read that every once in a while a acro comes in from the wild with a diff color patch from the rest of acro colony. lets just say this acro is blue in color for example and there is a green patch that growths the same as the rest of the coral just in a green or diff color. This example I have personally witnessed myself on a blue tort that was in my lfs. The article said something about acros from the Pocilloporidae family like stylophoras might be the catalyst for natural grafting to take place. This is what sparked my interest to conduct this experiment! My experiment wont reveal if you can graft any acro using a acro from the pocilloporidae family this I know. Who knows at what life cycle, spawning event, water parameter, or any other single or combination of know or unknow factors make this possible in the wild. Thats why I love corals so much. They have more to teach than any one person could ever hope to learn. What I want to get out of this experiment is confirmation or denial that this specific family of corals can grow together in a common location without either specimen showing any physical aggression torwards the other. In my mind this will leave a shimmer of hope that this coral might some how be a possible candidate in the future for grafting acros. From what I have witnessed in the past most coral no matter if its in the same species or phylum for that matter wont touch or even get close each other without displaying some type of aggression. So now to the experiment. I took two small frags of diff. color stylos(both about the size of a pencil eraser) and mounted them side by side. They were not touching but I made sure that they were close enough so that when thier polyps were exstended that they touched. It has been about three weeks and they are starting to encrust. I havent seen any stinging or bleaching at this point. I would imagine they would have encrusted faster than they have but then agian stylos have never grew very fast my system. They deff dont like being directly under my diy leds. The encrusted portion is less than a 1/8th of an inch around bloth frags. They do seem to be growing at about the same rate across the plug and there is deff. a visible border between the two its like they encrusted until they met in the middle then started encrusting out the opposite way. I also have a green, purple, and rainbow stylo mounted on the same piece of substrate and they have not shown any aggression yet. So what do you guys and gals think will happen?
