Pet Peeve - Do you or don't you?
 

Anytime I get a new coral or frag, I cut it off the base and mount it directly to the rock. It drives me to see people puttying frag plugs, or worse, chunks of maricultured bases to their rock work. Even after the coral encrusts, I can see the outline of the plug/base.
Who does it which way and why?

Well for myself I dont have a frag tank and I want my new SPS to grow. I dont like the look either but I wanna make sure I have them in a good spot and that they are happy.

After a few months I may just put them on the rock..

just my thoughts

I'm just like you Brad. I take that a step further and buy only frags as I think the mini colonies for sale that come on the mound-like bottom also look a little unnatural. There are a ton of tanks way nicer than mine that do have corals on plugs that are visible... of course I'm just referring to this specific aspect of scaping =)

frag plugs and discs drive me bananas ! However, I do use rubble to mount my frags and then mount the rubbled with frag to my rockwork. I like doing this because it is slightly less ugly and allows me to easily move the frag around which I do frequently.

I also have a few smaller frags, but I keep them in little magnets on the side. And I guess it's not so much placing the frag somewhere good, it's about permanently gluing the plug or base in place :)

I've done this to every frag almost. I consider it the same as mounting to the rock. My rubble bits are tiny (that is what she said - sorry I need one of those every now and then) and I put them on the rock so they blend in really well. You def can't tell they're there although currently that's because my algae is hugging a lot of my frags.

See this I remember that someone here i dont know who bought a crap load of colonies and just like Brad stated glued them all on the rocks. Then in about 5 months put out there Look at my tank!! Look at how much its grown and doing well. then you see the plugs.

+1

I see this as coral gardening. See, for me, I hate the look of frag shelves in a display tank. If all I have are little frags though then glueing those in place without the plugs, for me, has not been as successful in frag retention than has been glueing the plugs down. Snails, clumsy fish, urchins .. it is a conspiracy of pretty much anything that moves in my tank (including the water now that I think of it) to find loosely attached corals and remove them from their mounting points. So I epoxy the frack out of the plug while minimizing contact with the coral itself. Yeah, it means that I have plugs on the rock, but, 1) they get covered in coraline in time and it's less conspicuous, 2) in some cases the corals have grown over the mounts and you can't tell (no really, you can't tell. Maybe not that many qualify in this category but it's nonzero), and 3) in the very beginning of this thoughtstream I said something about coral gardening, the thing is, this is coral gardening and part of gardening is pruning and replanting and the like, if the coral does well over time then it's likely that it will get removed and the plug, if still conspicuously sticking out by then, can simply be removed and the coral and/or whatever frags can be remounted using other means (it's been years since I was at this point but I fantasize one day I'll have a tank like my 75g where I couldn't even give SPS frags away for free because the growth was that fast).

I used to put them in as I received them ( plugs or culture bases) but have introduced too many pests that way, all new purchases go into quarantine till happy and then they are removed from the base they came on when they go into the display, any residual coral that remains on the base stays in the quarantine and is given away or chucked.

I hate it, I bought some zoo's a long time ago on disks, and now, I'm afraid I will be stuck with them on the disk. I much prefer to just get the cuttings and glue them myself, or have them mounted on small pieces of LR that looks more like it belongs

I put them on frag racks if they're very small and allow them to grow a little (or a lot, sometimes they stay on there for months due to lack of time to mount them). For the most part they usually just encrust onto the frag plug which is a pain but then I whack the bottom off and epoxy it to the rock much (much) later. otherwise it usually gets lost in the tank as a small frag.

For the larger colonies that come on those chunks of rock I usually remove them and mount them directly to the rock. For some reason I can't throw the rock out so it ends up in the sump, spreading its lovely hitch hiker wonderfulness to the rest of the tank :rolleyes:

http://reefbuilders.com/files/2012/0...-2-300x237.jpg

This may appeal to some who don't like having to cut, trim, and mount their frag plugs.
Apparently you don't have to drill either, just find a small crevice and twist them in. It looks to be a nice small profile also so the frag has a better chance of seamlessly covering the plug and rock.

Found the info here:
http://reefbuilders.com/2012/01/17/reeftap-frag-plug/

you could stop "loosely" mounting them :)

Anti plug.

Have two. Hate them. In fact. Passing on a couple rics to get one gone.

Yes, frag plugs **** me off. I'll raise that one further to say that it annoys me to no end when people mount frags vertically on the plugs, especially tabling acros. First of all, encrusting rates of frags are higher when flesh touches the rock. This is a scientifically proven fact. Second, if I see one more efflo or solitaryensis mounted vertically I might snap. This leads to retarded looking growth patterns.

If my frags aren't encrusted I pop them off the frag plugs in a heart beat and will usually mount them to rubble on an angle to that 1/2" of flesh is touching (I got my purple bonsai to completely encrust the rubble in just over a week this way) and mount the rubble to the rock.

That being said, I do have frag plugs in my tank from incoming frags I couldn't pop off. And it kills me every time I look at them. Grow corals, grow! I don't want to look at those stupid plugs!

I like mounting my new pieces to bigger frag pluggs and then mount the whole thing to the rock. It instantly gives the small frags I have a ta;;er look. Kinda like Platform shoes.

I took this pic just for you guys. Yes, it's an ORA Red Planet, and yes, it's mounted on a frag disk that's nearly bigger than it.
http://i125.photobucket.com/albums/p...t/P2152634.jpg

Haha, generally i avoid it, but didn't want to risk anything with this guy. I have a few that i mounted awhile ago on frag plugs that have completely encrusted now. I have a couple that have grown 100% outwards and will not encrust onto the plug, those are in the future plans to break off and reattach. I would say that 80%+ of my frags i removed from the frag plugs, but sometimes the plugs are much easier to glue to the rock....

mount it directly? how? any pics?

Just wrap a bit of putty around base, stuff it in a crevice. Pretty simple, then frag encrusts onto the rock.

I just take the cutters and chop it off at the base.

Ya I know. But like Lampshade said, not with the expensive ones :razz:

Well, ya, the expensive ones are the smallest. My red planet frag has sat in a magnet mount for a year, and it's just ready to cut off. Then I'll leave the plug and skin flap where it is and grow a new one, which I'll be able to sell in 2014 or so..:)

One of the frags I got from Dez a while back was mounted to the end of a golf tee. was crazy easy to stick into the rocks and invisible too. I wish all vendors did this! But yeah as soon as I get home I snap them off the plugs and if it's too hard to I chop the stem part of the plug off so it's easier to jam into my rocks.

Funny thing is one of the only sps I've lost was on a plug and now I have a plug without even a frag on it in there. Been forgetting to remove it.

haha! 2014? no way, you would be surprised how many of us have purchased skin flaps? :biggrin:

thats a great Idea

im personally not fondof theplugs with the stem i findthemdifficult to work with but onthe new tank i am going to try not to use plugs period. but with some colonies its hard not to

The frag I bought took 14 months to grow from a 1/4" to something with a couple of stubby branches. 2014 isn't kidding :)

My Wayner's Red Planet (WRP Ltd Ed) has to be one of the fastest growing corals I've owned. Have you talked sweetly to it?

Define sweetly :) Probably not...

Seriously, it's now about 1.5", which took more than a year...

I have a pink with green rim Millie that has encrusted maybe half a inch in 2 years. That half an inch was in the last two months since I moved it. Would love to see a branch grow out of it. It is just a blob right now.

Chris

Oh Brad, you'll love this. This would look great in your tank (front page of Reefbuilders right now).

http://reefbuilders.com/files/2012/02/FragTree360_2.gif

So freakin' ugly!!! Not sure why anyone would put those in their tank :)

Love it.. Cause that's how I roll!

+1. Now, how to get Snappy using rubble... :twised:

look!!!.....frag shrooms for your tank!

http://reefbuilders.com/files/2012/02/FragTree360_2.gif

OH so pretty,the stand would be used as a candle holder as my wife would say :biggrin:

lol those do look like mushrooms, I hate my disks, I broke them up though so now they look less like disk and more like rock. still ugly though. why dont more places just mount them to rubble?

I do mount my frags on plugs, not because I like them, but they are easier to manage as I allow them to settle and grow out a bit before I sell them.

Plus, plugs are easier to stick into racks so that they don't get blown around as much, as I do have higher flow in my tank, and I don't have a dedicated frag tank.

If I stick the frags on rubble, then they get tossed around so much that I lose them. So they are not great, but sometimes necessary. And people can always remove them as they please.

I agree completely with this, plugs are awesome for frag systems and selling. I'm just saying that once I buy the frag and it's going into the display, the plug is not :)
I would not use anything but plugs for a frag system/grow out tank.