Branching lps skeleton

[patback]

So you know how dead skeleton turn all brown and look like rock? I've had a candycane coral as one of my first coral, so it's about 3 years old. It grew up to 6 heads and was lost in the rockwork and found after about 6 months under a sandbed, 3 small "heads" remained intact, if you want to call them heads. Sort of just a bubble of flesh attatched at a very small part of the skeleton. I've had it in place in sufficent flow and lighting for over a year now an I have seen no new heads form or any skeletal growth at all. I've tried feeding meaty foods, pellets, coral accel, phyto, etc. nothing.

Could a skeleton with live polyps die? Shouldn't the polyps themselves form a new skeleton in this case? Does anyone think grinding the skeleton down to a fresh white base with no growth on it produce more polyps? I'm thinking of just buying 3 or 4 more frags and glueing them all in a bunch to make it look like a colony. Lol.

[Boggers]

as long as there is some flesh it is still alive at least partially. You can "frag" the branch and glue it, but it will take a very long time to recover if it does at all. I had on survive as a bud for 6 months or so until a fish bumped it and the flesh just floated off as if it was never there.

[jservedio]

Even if all the flesh appears to be gone and you can't see anything - even just a few cells can make a complete comeback. I had a chalice fall behind my rockwork and was bare skeleton covered in coralline and all kinds of other critters for probably close to a year. The skeleton was a cool shape so I put it on my sandbed as a little "island" that I was planning on glueing some zoas to. Well, I didn't get around to glueing anything down for 6 months or so and in that time, two little tiny "eyes" started to re-appear on the skeleton. It's been about 7 or 8 months since those little eyes first appeared and now they are two mini chalices that are about 2cm across on opposite sides of the dead skeleton.

 

Just stick the whole skeleton in the sand and forget about it for another year - if they were strong enough to hold on they will regrow. If you don't have room cut it way down and glue the little spots plus a bit of dead skeleton to a frag plug and see what happens. Honestly, I would just leave them be if they aren't taking up too much space.