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#1
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SPS hanging/suspension
Who is doing it and what kind of success are you having? different growth patterns? different coloration? increase in growth rates? any kind of info you can give on this matter please feel free....also any pics you can post would be nice too.
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#2
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I hang them over the sides a lot glued to pop bottles or eggcrate shapes or pieces of CD cases. I have two pieces of beige Monti d. swinging in the breeze in my prop tank. They are algae collectors but they grow free form. I like the stuff over the side better, then the snails and crabs can still get to it.
Check out my pics in the "show us your skimmerless pics" thread in the general forum. You can see stuff hanging, like green humilis on a CD case that is plating from 5 little frags, a table Acro hanging from an eggcrate hook and a huge colony of Pocillapora d. on a CD case. All my frogspawn frags are hanging from pop bottles. It went from 8 heads to about 40 now and needs to be fragged again. My torch hated being hung however. I have completely GSP covered pop bottles(well the half in the water, I just cut two big slits and hang it on) |
#3
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Hey scubadude, have you got any pics of that acro that you got from me to susspend? has it healed over the break yet and are you seeing any new axial coralites forming yet? probably still too soon for new branching. That'll be an interesting piece to watch grow out. It'll probably be nothing but a big fluffy round ball of extended polyps. Did you mount the sister frag (actually maybe threy are cousins) conventionaly as a control ? do you have a tenative ID on the acrto yet?
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#4
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hehehe....I was gonna post pics anyway. Sorry the first pic is hard because it has a big swing radius...Im testing to see if this is beneficial.
the last two pics are the same coral from your system Brian. It was a couple days after I got the frags from you before I could mount/hang them but there is growth over the break point already The 2nd picture is not getting as much light as it may appear to be getting, it is not in the line of fire of the SS either as it may appear. I agree this will be an interesting piece to see the difference in growth patterns. I have already begun planning stages of a whole hanging system incorporated with a standard vertical system utilizing every cubic inch of my aquarium growth space. |
#5
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Quote:
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#6
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why do people suspend corals?
__________________
Dave Nguyen |
#7
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Rock on Mr scubadude!!!
I believe the theory to suspended corals is that they don't align to a set current flow and therefore supposedly grow in all directions. Typically corals grow with the current and look like plant roots in a stream after a while (at least in my tanks with heinous laminar flow) I have a birdsnest that is actually growing down because the flow comes from the top and flows downward through that coral. I have all of those things hanging over the side, nothing glued permanently. I snap out the segments in eggcrate to make a plastic hanger. I cut two parallel slits in a plastic pop bottle (I use that peach melba fizzy water from Wal-mart in particular) and then either superglue the frag to the bottle (I have GSP's and BSP's like that) or tie frags to the bottle(frogspawns), or superglue a piece of CD case to the bottle for a sturdier surface for gluing SPS frags. I'll take more specific and detailed pics of fraggenstein's coral torture chamber. |
#8
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Here is the plate glued to the popbottle with 5 original A. humilis(?gemmifera?) frags that are plating nicely
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#9
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Here is a closeup of the A. humilis frags
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#10
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Here is a table Acro epoxied to an eggcrate hanger
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#11
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Here is a closup of my now totally PO'd table Acro
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#12
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Here are some lage millepora-ish frags that I spaced widely. The crabs already broke one little shard off its glue dot. Save every scrap of coral with good flesh on it. They grow big eventually and they are free frags.
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#13
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Here is an eggcrate hanger with the frags glued right to it. These frags are starting to plate and the should become one colony too. I try to start with 6 frags and I am happy to have 4 make it still attached.
You can see the humilis plate in the background in its normal place. |
#14
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Here are some GSP's on a pop bottle and some froggies hanging next to it froma pop bottle/nylon tie rig. These are in my real junk box in VHO actinic lights.
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#15
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OMG Frick-n-Frags!
You are my hero! LMAO...MY Lord! You have been doing some major experimenting! My favorite one by far is coralhager7.jpg because of the possibilities with the stair stepping of frags....Awesome pictures! I hope you dont mind if i copy some of these techniques?
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#16
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Quote:
Its mainly to utilize more growth space, spur different growth patterns, and I have even seen change of coloration. There may be many reasons some which may not even be known yet. I dont think its a real common practice yet, and still in experimenting stages. |
#17
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Help yourself, that's why I showed y'all I will keep trying crazy stuff as I get my hands on it.
Thank God for superglue and epoxy not being very toxic. Those glues sure make life easier. The downside to the eggcrate hangers is that the snails bunch them up and broke a few frags off and a couple had to burn each other a little to get settled being neighbors. But I think they will grow nice heads. |
#18
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Frick-n-Frag
How are you making your stair stepping egg crate structures and your egg crate hangers? Are you glueing them? If so what type glue? Or melting them or........... I need more space, have a few corals suspended over power heads and from some of my braces but still have corals growing into each other and some occaional coral wars. |
#19
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Real brute force technique involving my small sized diagonal side-cutters. I snip out all the segments that don't look like a hanger.
I sized the hanger to go over the top of the tank, then made the stair-steppies, then left segments reaching back to the glass to hold it out. They could probably be overlapped a little when patterning the cutout on the sheet of eggcrate, but I just had a few useless pieces of eggcrate. They probably could use some fine tuning, like gluing a crossmember horizontally to keep them from being bunched up by the snails (trochus D-8 dozers especially) I think I am going to try one Lego plate instead of a CD case and see how snapping legos(with a frag glued to it) onto the baseplate works. I'm looking for high density packing of small frags like birdsnest and Monti d. Acros are hard to deliberately make small uniform frags. They actually suck fragging and sometimes even my big sidecutters can't get through like tables and humilis and you just have to get the chisel and hammer out (that is so frickin scary putting the chisel to your head of Acro, especially when there is a crab in there too) because this minimized the handling trauma, bam, one shot, trauma over. I also think fuzzy absorbent things like towels harm corals, and the soft traction of our hands too. sharp and hard things things like countertops and metal tools only touch at one point, like a crab's foot, and don't damage the really thin layer of coral flesh. Even if you poke a little hole in the coral, right to the bone, it heals within hours, but a big towel abrasion kills the whole area. We used to have Hydnoman made out of a headless lego dude with a big Hydnophora frag for a noodle. He fell in a really bad place where we couldn't even see him. But he'll be back now that I'm ready to frag some more Hydnos. Moooaahhaaahaaahaaa! |
#20
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LMAO...you gotta hook us up w/some pics of hydnoman!
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#21
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Yeah, the Aiptasia are quaking in their boots already, cause a mean burnin' is a comin' their way. We used to just tie-wrap him into place and watch the little guy cook. Xenias are the best, they look like they are smoking as they dissolve into nothingness. The Hydnophora always looks better after a dissolving too, so maybe it is actually digesting some of its victim's mass. (Be careful though, if the crabs throw Hydnoman onto any other coral c-ya-bye-bye the coral is a goner!)
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#22
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Been wanting to do a leggo reef. Make a leggo structure and then use 2 or 3 types of fast growing reef building corals to do some reef builidng, just to see how long it would take yo get to the point you couldn't tell it was built with leggos. Maybe using some softies like Xenia, zoannids or green starts to fill in a few area's around the SPSs
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#23
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Frick-n-Frrags
how long have you had leggos in your tank? did hydoman actually grow attached to the leggo stucture? |
#24
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Hydnoman was a while ago. The hydnophora had plated down onto the plastic guy. Eventually he surfaced but the Hydno was dead and I took it out. I have had one lego upside down that I shoved some little slimy leather frags into and weighted it with gravel. That is very high quality plastic I think. The Lego is still even red colored. I feel pretty confidant about using them regarding any leaching or poisoning issues.
I think the lego houses is a hilarious idea. I was thinking about decorating some of those stupid Penn-plax air toys or turn something into a GSP chia pet. You never saw my Xmas card with Poci the reindeer that I posted did you. Poci has a huge afro now. Here is the original from last Nov or Dec. http://archive.reefcentral.com/vbull...?postid=336233 |
#25
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Brian (bgdiving) that frag that I got from you...the 2nd pic above well its already totally encrusted over the thread. Just thought you might want to know....this is turning out very interesting...the polyp expansion is double that of the other piece that I just did a standard mount upright. I can definately see this as a viable source for more experimentation.
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