Devil's Hand & Colt Coral

[CarmieJo]

Impaling poor defenseless corals with plastic drink swords, how could you? Actually it is a great idea as long as the coral doesn't float up off the sword.

[JoshLongton]

Ok. I worked itself off the sword piece. I am running out of ideas here. AHHHH.

[CarmieJo]

Nylon net wrapped loosely over the coral and secured with a rubberband. Some people have luck with sewing through them with fishing line and then securing the fishing line to a rock.

[sucker_fish]

What did you use to cut the frags off with? if it was something like a regular pair of household scissors or something else that may have been dirty, rusty, etc. you may need to re cut them with a clean xacto knife or some really sharp shears that havent been used. If the coral stalk is turning black it may have infection where it was cut, simply cutting the frag above the black area with clean tools should remedy this problem.

as far as using glue it is possible but must be done fairly quickly. this is how I frag my colt corals. Lay out a clean towel and grab some paper towels. place the desired piece of rock on towel and dry a small area with paper towel. get frag and place it on towel drying the end of stalk area with the cloth towel. put a couple drops of gel type super glue on rock and then dab the end of the coral on the paper towel or cloth towel to try to dry it as much as possible, immediately after that quickly put 1 drop of super glue gel on end of coral and stick it to glue on rock. hold it there for approx 1-2 minutes then put rock with frag attached in the tank. The water will actually speed up the curing time of the glue. as long as there is not too much flow in the area it should stay attached.

[doctorthompson]

I have a species of Sarcophyton (Toadstool leather) that refuses to stay put in a rubble tray after fragging and I usually end up having to do the same thing (plastic skewer) with them. I usually use old oyster/clam shells so I can glue both ends of the skewer to the edge of the shell leaving the frag lots of room in the middle.

If you take advantage of the fact that it's glued in place and give it plenty of water flow (alternating if possible) any commonly kept soft coral species "should" do fine with the skewer method.

It might shed a lot during the first few growth spurts so keep up with partial water changes (and run carbon if you have any other species in the same tank, especially stony corals). It's also okay to use a turkey baster to suck up chunks of the mucus coat once it's mostly hanging free of the coral. Don't tug or force (or brush/scrub!!!) the mucus coat off ... at best all that does is trigger another molt and another 2 or 3 days of mostly closed polyps).

If you have live rock in the same tank a light dosing of phytoplankton might help speed up the growth as well. Devil's Hands "appear" to respond to phytoplankon but I've yet to see a gut content analysis that shows that they directly absorb/consume much of it, more likely they're responding to and consuming microscopic organisms in the water/substrate that are drawn out by the phyto ... if you don't have live rock or substrate in there you're probably better off not dosing (please post results if you try phyto without live rock and notice a feeding response!)

last of my $0.02 on Lobophytum sp. (... which, if it isn't readily apparent, is one of my all-time favorite species of soft coral, heh)

[clownfish4me]

i have used a small plastic container and put broken pieces of live rock that i wanted the frags to attach to at the bottom of the bucket and simply spread the frags around the live rock. withen a few short days the fragged pieces were attached to the rock at which time i removed them from the bucket and placed in my main tank....