Fragging SPS - The basics:

Small-Polyped stony (SPS) corals are surprisingly forgiving in the way they can be fragged and given time and good conditions will eventually regain a natural-looking colony formation. Some of the techniques described here should help you to minimize the damage to your mother colony, and for any fragments that you take.

It is possible to frag some species of SPS corals with nothing but your bare hands. All you need to do is snap off a branch and wedge it in to a hole in the rock. Alternatively you can stick it to a peace of live-rock with super glue gel or putty such as Milliput. It is often a good idea to flatten the piece of rock you are using with a scalpel or craft knife to give you a clean base to attach your frag.  Both methods should work well but if you plan to distribute your frags then it is usually better to attach them to individual pieces of rock. 

Fragging of an SPS coral with long branches is really quite straightforward. In an attempt to maintain the colony's aesthetics, look for branches in the rear of the colony, its fine to use branches that might be shaded and that are no longer growing well. Break them off using your fingers or clip the branches off with a cutting tool such as pliers, wire cutters or similar. Remember to try to keep cut branches out of the sand, as this generally doesn’t do so well for hard corals, especially if they fall over.  If you can remove the colony from the tank a rotary tool such as a “Dremel” are particularly useful.  Once cut these frags can be attached to rock using glue or putty as mentioned above.  Please do take care with rotary tools and make sure that you are wearing appropriate hand and face cover. Make sure that you use a new or cleaned cutting accessory as corals will face poisoning if they come into contact with rust.

The above techniques are fine on the branching SPS types such as Cornet Euphyllia, however the plating types will be harder to frag. Some plating types will grow new lips that can be simply snapped of and attached to rock. The larger colonies will need to be removed from the tank and cut using the Rotary tool with a diamond cutter to break down the plate into appropriate sizes then mounted to live rock.

One question you may have is how long an SPS can be out of the water without adverse affects the answer to which I can’t possibly say for. All I can tell you is that I have had my Montipora out of the water for 15min without any adverse effects, and in the wild corals may emerge from the water for longer than this during low tides. It will undoubtedly be related to the health of the coral specimen, so as mentioned in previous articles, take great care if your coral is a new purchase or you are unsure on its current success in your tank. 

SPS corals available in the hobby these days tend to be almost always maricultured or aquacultured, but this division of corals also makes up the majority of corals currently aquacultured in marine tanks around the world.  Give it a try; it really is as easy as it sounds.

Thanks to Matthew Ward  for contributing this article

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