pocillapora attacking monti

[tramsden]

I have a pocillapora which is starting to touch a nearby montipora digita, the battle is being won by the pocillapora and the monti has tissue damage, it has lost about a third inch of tissue at the point of contact.

The question is wether I should leave alone or remove the branch which is damaged . Next I wonder wether to frag the pocillapora at the area adjacent to the monti . If the future growth will be in the same direction , then maybe it would be easier to make a clearance through the monti instead?,, will subsiquent regrowth be in the same direction as the fragged bit??

Any comments gratefully received..

.. Tony

[G-money]

Your choice - some folks prefer the more "natural" method of letting things grow as they will. As long as your tank stays stable, interactions between corals like Pocis and Montis would rarely (if ever) lead to the complete demise of one of the corals. Of course, you have the dead areas to look at, but they are often overgrown with coralline in a healthy tank.

You can also interject and prune them. I haven't found that snipping branches of mid-sized and larger corals affects their overall growth too much, but it's not something I do regularly, either.

Personally, I try to place corals so I won't have to worry about spacial issues until they're pretty decent sized (which might be your case anyway)...

I have found that if a coral is getting beaten prertty heavily on one side, it will start to grow away from the disturbance. Other factors such as light and flow also play factors in this as well, though.