Great thread. I am always interested in new techniques.
Here is the technique I use to grow colonies of zoanthids. I cut several polyps, rock and all, out of my colonies. I do this using tile cutters (pliers used for snapping ceramic tiles). I look for high spots on my rock. I can cut right under the polyps and scrape off a layer of rock. I then use super glue gel to glue the frag to a piece of live rock. I glue 3-4 frags (3-10 polyps each) to the rock, spaced out evenly. The frags then fill in the spaces.
Grow Pattern
I found this much quicker to grow a new colony, then waiting for a single frag to grow from the middle out. In a four month period I grew 12 new 50-100 polyp colonies from frags taken off my two mother colonies. The mother colonies had about 300 polyps each and I randomly removed about half the polyps off each parent. I not only grew the new children colonies, but the parents fully filled back in. The only draw back is, every time I do this, the parent colonies get slightly smaller (do to the removal of the rock). Knowing this, I am also growing out a new, much larger, mother colony. I got mint zoa's growing out of my .....
New Colony
Jason