There’s a dirty little secret that no one in the hobby will tell you, but I will. Once you get good at this, corals grow, and no I don’t mean the “1cm per year”当您的潜水船长告诉您不要触摸珊瑚时，他会背诵。不，我的意思是他们真的成长，以至于如果您给他们足够的时间并很好地对待它们，他们就会从坦克中生长出来。
Now for those of you that frag everything once there is a ½” or more of growth this is great. But for those of us that enjoy growing nice full colonies this can be a problem. Actually it can be a multitude of problems. How do you decide where and when to separate a colony that is overgrowing its neighbors? What do you do with the large piece you’ve removed? How do you reduce the stress on a tank that cutting a big colony can produce in a small closed system?
Now that you’ve got a great looking tank with everything happy and in the right spot how can you slow the growth so you don’t have to regularly have to cut out a large portion of the tank? These are just some of the problems we generally don’t think about when we set up our tanks and if you are like me, overstock them. And lastly why the heck did I ever put aMontipora在我的水箱里？
我知道这听起来像是一个不错的问题，但是在拥有20加仑的纳米到1200加仑的SPS坦克之后，我已经意识到，分手或切割大块或珊瑚的殖民地是我最不喜欢的活动之一我必须在坦克中做。但是，当事情真正开始成长时，这是一个必要的邪恶，这就是每个人都想要的。
根据我的经验，珊瑚要么在成长和繁荣，要么失败和垂死，两者之间确实没有。考虑到我们投入的成功，我将每次都在成长和繁荣。对于那些花园并拥有阴影床或其他类型的多年生植物的人，问题是相似的，您必须定期将床稀薄，否则一种植物将占主导地位，或者该植物将从中心死亡。然而，与植物不同，珊瑚倾向于在其生长的底物上包裹。
As a result, thinning them or cutting them takes a little more effort, but with the right tools it can be done with minimal stress on either you or the tank. As with everything in this hobby having the right tools makes doing the job much easier. My 300 gallon tank recently reached 3 years of age and I have found that it is usually at this point that I have had to do some major pruning of the corals. In this case I realized that the entire right hand side of the tank was pretty much dominated by three corals.
AMontipora spumosahad encrusted on most of the live rock and was starting to overgrow everything, including the neighboring Acropora colonies and frags that were growing vertically would not be spared its wrath. AMontipora aequituberculatathat had grown from a frag only a year earlier to the point where it was now growing over the top of everything in its path and a colony ofSeriatopora“bird of paradise” that was dominating to the point that it had filled up the side of the tank and was encrusting on the glass.
As with your children you don’t really realize how much they have grown until you are either away from them for a while or until you look at the big picture. In this instance I did not realize how much these corals were overgrowing their neighbors until I looked at the tank from the top down. Then it was readily apparent that these corals needed to be dramatically thinned down.
起初，我尝试了旧的“只是打破它们”的稀疏方法，但这是一场灾难，因为它所做的只是造成了一堆破碎的碎片和大量的粘液，使整个水箱都压力了。所以知道这一点，继续这种方法是一个坏主意，所以我去了I thoughtwould be a somewhat rougher means of thinning them in that I brought out the hammer, chisels and screwdrivers. I had used these in the past in my 1200-gallon tank but had not had to use them in a while.
Since this was a smaller tank I got a couple of smaller chisels as well as a couple of screwdrivers that I could also use for finer work. Fortunately corals are not as dense as rocks, so you do not have to use much force to have the chisel or screwdriver break through the coral and the live rock. For this reason you also do not need a large hammer in order to get the desired effect. Since you are only really tapping lightly under water, the small hammer also does not cause the splashing that a larger hammer would.
For breaking up the colonies you simply need to use the small chisels or screwdrivers to kind of score the colony where you want to break it off. I make punctures in the encrusted portion of the colonies or sections I want to remove at approximately ½”-3/4” intervals along the colony and once these are completed I can usually lift the piece I want to remove away from the remaining colony. If it will not break then the larger chisel can be used to connect the punctures. The small chisels can also be used to pry the colony off of the live rock it is sitting on or is attached to.
但是，即使小心不要过分压力珊瑚，我仍在切割它们，它们仍然倾向于产生很多粘液，这不仅强调它们，而且还会强调邻近的珊瑚。因此，为了最大程度地减少它的影响，我已经学会了在每周换水之前立即进行这项工作。当从水箱中取出水以进行变化时，我去除了切割导致储罐压力最小的粘液和碎屑。
我还添加了一个额外的袋子或两个碳，以进一步减轻这种压力。由于大多数情况下，零碎的碎片不会保留在储罐中，因此一旦破裂，就将其移至装有水箱水和碳的水桶中。最后，如果看起来珊瑚在此过程中以任何方式压力，则将额外的动力头添加到水箱中以增加流量，并防止粘液沉降和压力附近的任何珊瑚。
在做这种剧烈的修剪我坚强ly recommend that you not only plan what you need to break off, but also where you are going to put the broken pieces. If you are putting it in back in the same tank that is no problem or if you are placing it another of your tanks like a frag tank, that is also good. But before you start cutting you need to have a home for the piece you have removed. Often times I have not realized how big the chunk of coral I was removing was going to be and as a result I had not prepared space for it and so I was left scrambling to find it a home.
As a result I have learned to talk with the shops near me as well as some of fellow nearby hobbyists to make sure that when I was taking pieces out of my tank I had a new home for them prepared. Nothing is worse than removing a chunk of coral that you like and sticking it in a bucket thinking you will find it a quick home only to watch it die in the bucket after it has had to sit there for a couple of days.
So as with everything in this hobby be prepared. The level of success we have achieved today at keeping sps and other corals is unprecedented. We need to be better at allowing for the rapid growth that many of us now achieve with these corals. And while this may sound strange, for some of us there is a need to find ways to slow the growth of our corals, while still keeping them healthy, otherwise we need to do regular massive pruning in our tanks.
This is not healthy for our tanks, or our corals and is also stressful for us. I wish I could say I was there and had figured it out, but as I said earlier my corals either grow like crazy and thrive or show no growth and perish. I’m sure there is some happy medium and I would enjoy hearing from anyone who has achieved this.
我问这个，因为我特别喜欢Montiporasand as everyone knows who keeps them they for the most part grow like weeds and cover everything in their path. Except of course for the rare ones that Jason Fox is bringing in, which are the exception as the slow-growing Montiporas I seek. So maybe the answer is to only keep slow-growing sps, but that to me seems too limiting.
