Gardening

[smp]

When introducing frags to your tank do you glue them to the live rock, place them in the sand or glue them onto medium sized rocks in hopes that they will cover that?
I like to keep my colonies on separate rocks so that I can tend to them as needed and move them around when it suits me.

I've found that since starting up a lot of the frags that I had are now attached to the rock where I placed them. This system (or lack thereof) isn't desirable when it comes to aquascaping and zoo maintenance (dips).

So yeah, how do you ... garden, your zoos?
I'de especially like to hear from Mucho and others who have tanks full of colonies.

Thanks

 

[-Keith-]

Not really an expert but this is what I do...

If the zoas are not attached, I crazy glue them to a small rock (maybe the size of a quarter). Then I glue the small rock to one that's a couple inches. Then I place the medium rock on the sand or live rock (depedning on the lighting I want)

The reasons I do this are...

1) Small rocks get knocked around/over too easily,
2) In time, the zoas will spread to the medium size rock (good for fraggin) but
3) they will not spread directly to my main live rock (and compete with other corals).

 

[tekknoschtev]

In the beginning, I tried my hardest to keep zoas on medium-large rocks in such a manner that they wouldnt spread to the "main" structure to make removal easy. A colony of zoas can only be knocked over so many times due to careful balanced placement before you realize that it simply isnt going to work. I gave up trying to control some of them and they've grown considerably in the tank.

When I recieve new frags, I mount them to decent sized chunks of rock (after losing about 4-5 different frags of zoas ranging in awesomness from super cool to absolutely amazing! to the freaking tang throwing them around... this became a necessity) that I place in the sandbed of the 150. Once they've had an opportunity to acclimate to the lighting they get moved to where I want them (I like having somewhat of an open sandbed, and frags littering the sandbed as they currently do is a pet peve of mine).

Its nice to have rocks convienient to remove in case of issues that require dipping, or fragging. I recently ran into an issue where I needed to frag a colony that was a corner stone for a section of the tank. I like to think of it as reef-remodeling because thats essentially what happened But it offers me the opportunity to rescape areas I'm not happy with anyways.