How do you glue corals down? + How to best feed corals?

[Halo_003]

Finally starting to get to the point of needing to glue my frags down. How do you guys get them off the disk to attach them to rock? I have a few different Z/P's, a good size 4 head hammer, a worm maze brain, an acan frag, and a green leather. Also some GSP but I'm trying to get it to grow on the back wall right now if I can.

 

Also, what's the best way to feed corals like an Acan or a hammer? I would like to at some point get a small brain, so same question for that.

 

Should I be feeding Z/P's? If so, how?

[PiscesFish]

I've only read about removing the plugs on some of these corals, but anyways. . .

 

For hammer and acan, I've read that you could usually try wedging something inbetween the plug and the frag and carefully break the bonding agent used to hold the two together.

 

For the Z/P's, you could try using a razor and carefully scrape them off the plugs.

 

I'm not too sure about a worm maze brain and a green leather. Haven't read anything about those two.

 

To get the hammer on the rock, you could either wedge it in a hole or inbetween two rocks, or you could take out the piece of rock and use the super glue gel thing. Or, you could do it my way where you use epoxy and you hold the coral into the epoxy while the epoxy dries and sticks haha.

 

I would be kind of afraid to glue down an acan down, IMO, due to the fact that you'd be pushing down on the more fleshier parts. Plus, since Acans are encrusting, you can just leave it on the rock and it should just grow onto the rock.

 

I'm not too sure about the Z/P's, but I'm pretty sure you can just drop it on the rock and make sure nothing goes by it that will cause it to move before it's able to attach itself to the rock.

 

BUT! the sticking stuff down to the rocks are all wild ideas, besides the branching hammer one haha.

 

And to somewhat answer your feeding corals question, I've seen videos where they have some kind of pellets that they drop onto the Acans. You can do that for Acans, Doughnuts, Scolymias, Brains, etc. For the Hammer, I've read that it all depends on your hammer. You could spray it with some Mysis Shrimp and it will eat it, or it wont take any food from target feeding and it will do just as fine.

 

For Z/P's, you can just use some Phytoplankton coral food. Like, I use Oyster Feast for my corals (leathers mainly) and my Green Buttons would eat some too from the water column.

[Horerczy]

I prefer to chop the plug away until it doesn't look like a plug. Less dangerous to the corals.

 

Super glue gel or something like hold fast for binding the corals down. Just watch things like hold fast as they tend to send skimmers into a frenzy.

 

I feed my acans with a turkey baster. Usually some frozen food (rods fish eggs and LRS Reef Frenzy are my favorites here) or new life spectrum marine pellets. My duncan, scolly, plate, blasto, Minimaxi nem, RBTAs, and folded brain get similar food but I don't feed many of them but 2-3 times a week. The plate he gets daily feedings from pellets blown all over the tank feeding the fish, the duncans sometimes get in on the action as well.

 

My hammer, frogspawn, and torch just slough off whatever I try to feed them. I don't think they care about eating directly. Still I'll occasionally give them a spritz of plankton slurry (basically I mix microvert, phytofeast, and a few other things that are like that) when I'm broadcast feeding for the filter feeders.

 

Feeding Zs and Ps is a totally optional thing ime as they will take lots of junk from teh water column that we probably never even notice is there.

[Dark_ice]

For z/p's ill use fuel and corral accel as (water additives) they support nice growth and ect. Then I also do a secret little mix up with reef roids and reef chili. Before the roids and chili I had great growth but they looked small and skinny. Then the roids and chili fattened them up and they gained color. When I do this I'll keep the power heads on but turn the feed from the sump off for the day.

[Lynaea]

Somewhere I found instructions for sandwiching superglue and epoxy, that's what I've been using. Essentially you mix the epoxy (aquarium stuff in a stick form) then put gel glue on one side and stick glue side to coral base, add more glue to the exposed epoxy end then stick to rock, the glue helps the epoxy stick to everything but it also helps to form the epoxy around odd shapes etc. I have used this for bigger stuff that wouldn't otherwise stand up, for smaller things I can usually wedge or balance them in place (zoa's).

 

I bought a dremel and diamond blades to cut frag plugs but haven't used it yet. I've had decent luck with using an exacto or regular knife to cut/wedge the plugs off when the coral was growing on a rock on the plug. I had less luck doing this with the blastos that seemed to have attached directly to the plug, I elected not to try the dremel since they were going in the sand bed anyway.

 

I have gorgonians, sponges, zoa's, mushrooms, rock flowers and blasto's. I've been feeding Kent liquid phytoplankton, MicroVert, reefSnow, coral frenzy and a bunch more as well as several different frozen variety foods including Rods food for everyone. I also got cyclopeeze which I have seen pretty much everything in my tank eat (well, maybe not the sponges ). I think the key is to offer a variety so everyone can eat what they like. I broadcast feed for the most part but I squirt some in the direction of the blastos and RFA's 1-2 times a week. I recently melted several different frozen foods together in some RO water and refroze the mixture in the empty wells so I could feed a variety every day without over feeding or wasting so much.

 

I don't know about leathers but Acans and brains should probably be direct fed, or at least targeted 1-2 times a week. I think my zoa's eat the cyclopeeze and smaller pellets etc, it also seems like they are eating the liquid foods as well. In general the food size should match the size of the critters mouth, I've seen zoa's and gorgs ignore or 'shove off' brine and mysis shrimp that were too big for them.

 

I found a lot of good videos on different corals including feeding and care from Tidalgardens.com, they have others on YouTube as well, they were pretty informative.