Aggressive Branching Hammer Coral

[justthewife]

We got this branching hammer coral with two heads from an LFS about a year ago. Since, it now has 20 heads and still growing new ones. It is stretching its tentacles out really far and then the hammer shaped tips break loose and land on my other corals and burn them pretty badly. Is this an aggressive attack to our other corals or is something wrong with my hammer? Will fragging this coral stop this behavior? We have a 90 gallon tank and the hammer seems to be just growing and growing. Reducing the flow doesn't seem to stop the long tentacles. I don't know much about fragging yet. This hammer seems to have quite a bit of tissue as opposed to skeleton. It doesn't appear to have good places to frag it. If fragging is the answer, do we cut through the tissue?

 

[knukles55]

If it's a branching hammer cut it from the base or you can do what I did and just put it on the sand bed I didn't have to worry about it anymore

 

[donkeys4hire]

My torches and frogspawns have released tips before. They are hazardous if they land on another coral and cause damage. It's a pretty common thing with euphyllia

 

[Dendrobates]

Will those tips form new corals?

 

[justthewife]

I don't know if it has been proven yet that the tips form other corals. I have been removing them and throwing them out in the attempt to keep them from blowing around and burning my other corals. I was just reading in a book about people reporting this happening and it was not confirmed at the time the book was written if its aggression or reproducing.

My husband fragged the hammer today and got four pieces out of it. So we will see if it continues with the same behavior.

 

[knukles55]

Well thee polyp extension will come back in a couple days as well as the growth in due time if its just getting to big I would just trim it and sell the off spring if you dont have room for it.