| 05-02-05
- Leather Coral Fragging Attempt
Leather
Coral Fragging Attempt
Unfortunately my leather coral started dying due to poor lighting,
at first I thought it was shedding, as they do from time to time,
but it continued to worsen and fall apart after a few days. I read
that I may be able to save it by Fragging it. (Chopping it up so
new coral will grow from the pieces)
I debated over what to do for another 24 hours, during that time
I removed it from my tank, placed it in a bucket with tank water,
filter, heater and a spare fluro light. Just in case it released
toxins into the water and killed my whole tank.
In the morning it wasn't any better, so I had
to act, I read about how to frag a leather coral on the Internet,
I had my Stanley knife blade, a few rocks and rubber bands. And
I started slicing the top right off the coral. It was awful, it
started oozing clear mucus, I felt bad but continued till I had
the whole top off. I then sliced the top like a pizza trying to
keep a bit of stalk on each piece, I had to throw out some sliced
because they were badly decomposing.
I rinsed the mucus off and attached the pieces
to rocks with rubber bands. I put the stalk and the pieces on rocks
back into the bucket, I waited a few hours for them to stop oozing.
And put them back in the display tank.
Next morning the rubber bands had cut through
the pieces and they had blown all over the tank... GREAT! I managed
to fish them out I reattached a few, and threw out the others that
looked a bit worst for wear.
A
few days later the pieces hadn't stopped dying so I threw them out
also, because of the fear of contamination to the main tank. I left
the stalk in the tank.
UPDATE: 2
Weeks after the leather has been fragged, the stalk has completely
been hollowed out, some bugger of a critter ate it out... So no
more leather coral... :_(
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