Hammer coral growth

[Baldy]

I have a question regarding some hammer coral in my tank. when i got this frag, it had 3 heads on it. Its branching hammer so i stuck the stalk in the sand in an open area of my tank and left it alone for quite a while now. Since then its grown quite a bit. It is in the process of splitting into what looks like about 8 heads now, and looks really good. Today I moved some of my corals around as i just set up a wavemaker and it looked like a couple corals close to the hammer were closing up from being touched. When i pulled the hammer out of the sand, i noticed that the stalk had grown about 3" longer under the sand. the stalk was placed upright in the sand, and now its grown along the bottom glass so it has a bit of a curve to it.

I wanted to glue the stalk to some LR and let the hammer spread out, but now it would look funny as the stalk is like 5" long! is it going to continue to grow? can i cut it off a bit before i glue it to the rock? should i put it back in the sand and let it grow there? I didnt think that the stalk would grow the other direction like that.

[somewherebeyondthesea]

That's interesting that u mentioned that as I had a similar experience, to answer your question though, I believe it is safe the cut the bottom, just make sure you don't have baby heads growing. My frogspawn went from two heads to 5 big and 4 baby ones!

Don't let the fleshy part touch the other corals, two heads from my candy cane had died as a result of that.


Cheers,




Steve

[Werbo]

A pic would help. From what you described you can cut the bottom dead skeleton portion. I wouldn't cut withing 2-3 inches of the heads where the living tissue is.

I predrilled my live rock to accept skinny acrylic rods. I can then drill the bottom dead portions of the hammer/frogspawn/torch skeleton. Place a rod in the 1/2 inch hole and crazy glue the acrylic rod into the skeleton. As the coral grows I can move it around within the live rock structure

[Baldy]

I thought that the bottom was dead skeleton until I pulled it out of the sand and realized it had grown another 3 inches. Now I'm not so sure it's dead :)