Proping Tubipora musica

NormanB · #1 01/01/2006, 09:35 PM

I recently got a large piece of this where a few of the tubes broke off as single tubes. The tube still has the polyp inside, so I want to try to save it. How does this coral spread? Can I stick the tube in a hole in a rock or what?

TIA

photobarry · #2 01/01/2006, 11:43 PM

I don't know if an individual tube has enough energy to grow and produce others. But if you want to try, they grow from the top by adding more material ipwards or sideways. I have two large colonies and there always seem to bee little individual tubes broken off and floating around my tank. I have never seen one survive, but I have never tried to save them. I blame my urchins for breaking off the pieces. In any case, the colony seems to grow really fast. It has grown at least 6" vertically in the past 1.5-2 years.

NormanB · #3 01/02/2006, 12:25 PM

Thanks Barry I guess I have nothing to lose so I might as well try and see what happens.

grenaria · #4 01/02/2006, 12:35 PM

I had a piece break off that contained a few polyps. I proped it up in the sand bed for a few days, and then mounted it to a small rock by drilling a tiny hole and sticking the longer ends of one of the tubes into it.

Here's a picture just after I mounted it:

It's now been almost 4 months and the new colony has just about covered the rock, I would say it is about 2" and must have more than 100 polyps and is thriving. It's funny how the colony grows from nothing, it still looks a lot like star polyps, it's only just now starting to grow up away from the rock.

photobarry · #5 01/02/2006, 12:47 PM

That's really cool! I might have to start trying to save the little pieces that break off mine.

grenaria · #6 01/02/2006, 12:52 PM

Funny, cause I was thinking about getting an urchin that would break more pieces off for me

. What type of urchin do you have that you think breaks your Tubipora?

photobarry · #7 01/02/2006, 12:53 PM

It's a Long-spined (Diadema).

NormanB · #8 01/02/2006, 02:40 PM

grenaria,

Thanks for the pic and method.

When I look at my large colony it looks like tightly packed pipes or tubes with very little space between them. On your frag how do the pipes form for more polyps to grow?

grenaria · #9 01/02/2006, 03:09 PM

That's a good question, tonight when I get home I will make the colony close up and take some skeletal pictures of the new colony because frankly I'm not too sure. However I do know that the tubes are not all that tightly packed, if you look down from the top, it looks like the colony is very tightly packed, but that's because of the stolons form plates like in this picture http://www.thepetstop.com/adminpics/tl/TP1202.jpg. However if you were to crack the colony in half you would see quite a large amount of room between the tubes http://www.dur.ac.uk/botanic.garden/...lorganpipe.jpg.

From my little daughter colony picture above, it looked as though all of the polyps had a sort of nucleus, I assumed that the tubes would grow out radially and the stolons would fill in the gaps where new polyps could grow, sort of like inflating a balloon, as it gets larger, there would be more room for polyps. This is not what seemed to happen at all though. The stolons grew out along the rock I mounted it to, there is very little vertical growth of the tubes, it just seems like more tubes form as the base gets wider.

My guess is that vertical growth is energy intensive and not necessary for new polyp creation. So as long as there is an easy way to add polyps by expanding the base of the colony, they will grow that way. The frag definetly grows much faster than the parent colony, and the parent colony only has horizontal growth on one edge (where it looks like the colony was removed from a much larger colony in nature).

The next adventure will be to see what happens when the frag runs out of rubble to support it's base, which should happen in another few months.