- It's a question I've seen many times on forums.
Is it better to mount your coral frags vertically,
like they were growing, or horizontally
where they're gonna have more connection with their mount?
Hi, guys and girls.
I'm ReefMan and this is a video
all about the best way to mount your acropora fragments
care of a just-published paper all about the topic.
SO, there is a paper
that was just published this May of 2020
in Biodiversitas called "Coral transplantation
"on a multilevel substrate of Artificial Patch Reefs:
"the effect of fixing methods on the growth rate
"of two Acropora species".
In this short paper,
which you'll find linked in the description below,
a team of researchers from Indonesia
are looking at the best way to rehabilitate reefs
that have been affected by bleaching.
One of the major ways people think that we could do this
is by transplanting coral from a healthy reef
back into an unhealthy one to reseed it
with different coral species.
So, if we're gonna do that,
what would be the best way to go about it?
Well, according to the paper,
there are a few ways we might be able do this.
Obviously you can mount frags
on existing rocks and on dead coral.
You can make artificial reefs
and just wait for coral to naturally establish itself.
Or you could do a combination of the two
where you build an artificial reef
and mount coral fragments on it.
And it turns out, this last option works the best.
Your artificial reef will keep sediment and algae away,
providing the coral that you've mounted on it
good growing opportunities.
Working in the water just off Panjang Island
in the Java Sea, Indonesia, this group used fragments
of Acropora aspera and Acropora copiosa
in conjunction with a custom multi-platform artificial reef,
which they call an Artificial Patch Reef.
They've deployed twelve of these reefs in the water
just off the southeastern end of the island,
and attached coral fragments
both vertically and horizontally
to the levels of their APR structure.
Interestingly, they didn't glue their coral down.
Instead they attached the coral using zip ties
to nails that had been placed into the concrete
of their artificial reef.
I've never seen this method before,
but they point out that they had good success
and it's just as effective as using epoxy or cement
to attach the fragments.
Acropora that was mounted horizontally
had better rates of survival.
On average 95 percent of these fragments survived
compared to only 85 percent of fragments
that were attached vertically.
The team believes that this could be
because when you mount one vertically,
corals are gonna spend a lot more energy
attaching themselves to their substrate,
whereas a horizontally mounted coral
is gonna have a lot more surface area touching it
and therefore can spend
less energy overall on attaching.
I do wonder, though,
could glue or epoxy change the results?
Because if you attach coral with one of those methods
it's gonna be much more firmly in contact with the substrate
versus a coral that is just sort of zip tied to it.
Now, Acropora mounted vertically grew faster
than those that they mounted horizontally,
but this seems to be affected
by the overall growth pattern of the coral in question.
Acropora copiosa seemed to do fine in either orientation,
it didn't really matter.
But Acropora aspera did much better with vertical mounting.
The paper attributes this to the different growth pattern
that aspera has when compared to copiosa.
You can see just by looking at it
that it branches a lot more aggressively
than the other species does.
So there you have it.
You can mount your acropora frags in any orientation,
but for the best success,
you should probably take into account
the growth habit of the coral
and try to mount your frag in a way
that sort of matches how it would normally grow.
I know, sort of anticlimactic, but now you know!
It really doesn't make a big difference in the end.
Interestingly, there is a paper that they referenced
about mounting coral on dead coral skeletons.
And I'm gonna check that out
because I do some coral skeleton in my tank now
due to a little bleaching event
that I've been going through.
So I hope that you are staying safe
and you're able to find food and medical care.
All that kind of stuff is in short supply right now.
There's so much going on in the world right now.
Our reefs can still provide
a little bit of an escape for us all
where we don't even have to leave our homes.
So there's that we can be thankful for.
I hope that you enjoyed the video.
There is a link down below, so check it out.
It's in the description.
Don't forget to like the video if you liked it
and maybe subscribe if you haven't already.
So thanks for watching.
Have a fantastic day!
Bye!