Myth #20 question

[Obi-dad]

I did not quite understand the way you are saying to best propogate corals. I understand that I should not 'plant' the frags broken side down, does that mean lay them broken side up? I am not sure what I am looking at in the photo on the right with the favored method. Please explain exactly how I should mount them.

[Skipper]

It's my understanding that Eric is referring to a horizontal mount as seen here:

<img src="http://reefcentral.com/forums/attachment.php?postid=2267546">

[Skipper]

Here's the growth after about a month. You can see how well the coral is encrusting.

<img src="http://reefcentral.com/forums/attachment.php?postid=2267669">

[Obi-dad]

Cool, now that I think about it seems natural - when a storm breaks off tips of corals, they will be just laying down like that. If it works for Mother Nature...

Do you do anything to the broken end, like coat with superglue to try to prevent infection? Since Mother Nature doesn't use superglue, I am guessing you don't need to, just wondering if that would help.

[Skipper]

Do you do anything to the broken end, like coat with superglue to try to prevent infection? Nope. You can see in the second picture how the coral heals itself along the break. It's actually starting to grow out of that area now.

[EricHugo]

Yes, I think superglue works very well as a band-aid for broken edges, but when places as Skipper has shown, the tissue covers the break very quickly, and the water flow helps prevent any problems. I thinkthe tissue will cover much faster without the glue, but either will work. The images Skipper provided are perfect ones to show how the fragment attaches quicker and more vertical growth results. For Acroporids, this allows for many radial corallites to become the faster growing axials, too.