button polyps

[rbakken]

I have a bunch of button polyps and am going to take some cuttings of them and was wondering how to go about this. I was told to just pull them off the rocks and put them in a container of some rock frags and they would attach themselves. I pulled some off and put them in a container but am not sure if that was right . When I pulled them off the rockthe fluid inside the stem came out and I was wondering if that was just water or did I kill them when I did this ? Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
rbakken

[mgk65]

Here's an article about fragging polyps:

http://www.thesea.org/captivesystems/coralfarm/default.asp?page=zooprop.asp

To answer your questions, I like to super glue the frags to small rocks to give them a head start.

Some fluid will come out of the polyps. You should take care to minimize the amount of fluid that gets in the tank. There can be some toxins in it that some animals do not like.

mgk

[Eric Boerner]

They bleed toxins when damaged. This can be harmful to other corals/fish in your system. Use carbon when you harvest them for a couple days.

You "could" just drop them into a container and hope they attach, but IME they take far too long to do so. I personally cut portions of the mat out with a scalpul and superglue them to a shell, rock frag, or whatever, and let them re-start their matting from there.