How to Frag Branching SPS Coral?

This guest post by My Reef to Yours Coral Frags will teach you all about fragging branching SPS coral!

Fragging live SPS is easy and is a great way to share coral frags with your friends. This article will cover most branching SPS such as Acroporas, Birdsnest, and others. If it has branches, we can frag it safely.

Tools needed: 

Latex Gloves 

Wire Cutters or Bone Cutters 

Superglue Gel 

Frag Disks or Rubble Rock

You want to wear gloves during this process to protect the coral and to protect you. Take a bowl a fill it with tank water. We can then place our mother colony in the bowl for safe keeping. Examine the colony and determine what branches you want to take your frags from. Simply take your cutters and cut the branches you want to frag at the base of your colony. You are fine to remove the mother colony from the water during this process, you just don’t want the coral to become dry. Once you have finished your trimming you can place your colony back into your tank and place the fragged pieces into your bowl with the tank water.

Next we will want to attach our new coral frag to the disk or rubble rock. Superglue gel works great for this and won’t contaminate the water. Simply apply a liberal amount of superglue gel to the disk or rock and then hold the frag (cut side) down to the glue. It will take a minute or so for the glue to harden. You can dip it in tank water as well to help speed up the setting process. It is best if the entire cut end is covered with glue. Often times the frag will exude some stressful slime but don’t be alarmed, that is normal.

   After taking a few frags from your mother colony, the newly cut areas are nothing but white stubs. Don’t be alarmed as those will quickly overgrow over and it will be difficult to distinguish where you took your frags from in a month or two.

     Once the glue has dried you can put your frags in your tank to allow them to heal. I like to give them heavy flow for the next day or so to blow away any slime that they produced during the fragging process. Within the next month or two your frag should start encrusting your frag disk or rock and will be ready to go to a new home!