Soft Coral Frags - Notched Plug Method

[jimsflies]

After asking for ideas of the best way to attach sinularia frags to plugs, here:
Fragging Sinularia?

@Coral Frenzy spurred an idea when he posted a link to these Soft Picks:



I decided to cut notches into frag plugs with an Inland Reef Saw. This was the most time consuming part of this operation. Frag plugs are hard!



Then I used the soft picks to attach the sinularia frags and wedge them down into the notch so they won't fall out.


This batch probably took about 20 minutes to setup:



Here they are starting to get happy after only an hour or so:




The frags were precut a few days ago and allowed to tumble in a container I attached to the side of my tank. This was a recommendation from @Skyhigh as he said the survival seems to go up if the frags have a few days to recover after the initial cutting. I used some of the mesh I use for tank tops to keep them inside the container.



One word of caution, if you have a small tank like I do with no filtration, be careful to minimize cutting in the tank and run a ton of carbon afterwards. Even though I tried to minimize the in tank cutting, I ended up killing nearly all of my LPS/SPS after fragging the sinularia. You can see from that last photo that they were starting to not look very happy and in retrospect I should have done a big water change and added carbon right then.

I'll update this thread with more progress as the frags grow onto the plugs.

These frags will be available at the Lansing swap for free! Just find the CaptiveReefs booth and spin the Frag and Swag wheel. There will be a ton of prizes depending on your spin.

#payitforward #fragandswag