- I bought new corals.
I mean, did I need to buy new corals?
Does anybody ever need to buy new corals?
Yes.
Yes they do.
(upbeat music)
Well, hello there.
All of my fellow and future hobbies.
My name is Matthew I am your BRS beginner guru.
This is episode 44 part two, how to dip your corals.
If you didn't watch the first video
which will be right here.
I highly recommend watching this one first because
it will get you ready for this video,
how to dip your corals.
Step number one, you have to drip acclimate
and temperature acclimate your corals.
I'm not gonna go into huge detail here because if you watch
episode 34, we went into detail about how to temperature
acclimate and drip acclimate fish
and it's the exact same thing.
Step number two, gather your tools
and set up your workstation.
Now's the time to set up a well lit workstation and gather
all of those tools we already discussed last episode.
Partially fill up three buckets with water, either from your
quarantine tank or from your display tank, whichever tank
you're gonna be drip acclimating them to.
Lay the three bowls or buckets out in order so you can
remember, which is which and add the appropriate amount
of coral dip to the first bucket.
Just follow the directions on the bottle
for the correct dose.
Lay out your tools for easy access
and then put on all the safety gear.
You're gonna need at least your gloves
but if you're working with zoas and barleys ,
then put on a mask and goggles as well and go and grab
your now drip acclimated corals.
Step number three, remove the frag plugs and discard them.
There are different ways to remove the frag plugs
depending on the coral.
Some corals with a stony base will just pop right off
their frag plug with just a little bit of pressure.
Using some sort of tweezer or scalpel can be a great tool
to get it underneath the stony coral and pop it right off.
For some encrusting corals that have already
encrusted onto the frag plug, the best you're gonna
be able to do is to use a pair of bone cutters to chip away
as much of the original frag plug as possible.
These options really don't work well for soft coral.
For soft coral, you can just leave it on it's frag plug
or a piece of rubble rock.
You can chip away from the rubble rock or the frag plug
removing as much as possible or a little more advanced
method is to use a razor blade to cut off the coral
from the base and then attach it to a new frag plug
or a new piece of rubber rock.
But that's a little bit tricky.
Step number four, inspect the corals and remove
as many pests as possible.
You're actually going to be doing this step twice before you
put them into your quarantine tank and having really good
lighting is really helpful for spotting those pests.
During this process, we are primarily inspecting the stony
bases of stony corals as well as the parts of the frag plug
in a rubble rock that we couldn't remove.
But as a beginner, you're probably like, "But Matthew,
what the heck am I looking for?"
And really you're looking to remove anything
that is not a part of the coral.
Things such as algae, worms, snails, eggs,
niutoplants or aiptasia.
And if you don't exactly know what to look for which makes
sense if this is your first time doing it,
don't worry about it.
Just remove the super obvious things like algae,
worms and aiptasia anemones.
Use one of your brushes to clean off the base of the stony
coral, but be careful not to accidentally brush the living
tissue of the coral.
And for any of those pests that are really stuck on there
use some sort of hard tool, either a scalpel or that butter
knife we talked about last episode to gently scrub
away at the stony base, again, being careful
not to touch the living tissue.
After removing as many pests as possible,
get the coral a quick rinse in the acclimation bowl
before putting it into the first container
that has the coral dip.
Step number five, use the turkey baster
to gently blast the coral.
Now that the corals are in the container with the coral dip,
be sure to set a timer for how long they should remain
in there based on the bottles recommendations.
And then every minute, use that turkey baster to gently
blast both the base and the polyps to remove as many
hitchhikers as possible.
Or if you wanna use the colander method,
then place the colander inside the bowl and put the coral
inside the colander and every minute,
just gently agitate the water by moving
that colander up and down.
The goal during this process is to create as much water
movement as you can, to remove those pests
that might be holding on still.
And believe me, you will be crazy surprised how many pests
can come off some of these corals.
Step number six, rinse the coral.
Now that your coral has been dipped and blasted,
go ahead and pick it up, move it to the next bowl,
hold it upside down in the water and vigorously shake it.
This will help shake free any remaining pests,
as well as rinse off that coral dip medication.
Then once you've rinsed that coral,
just go ahead and place it into the next bowl.
Step number seven is to repeat step number four,
inspect and remove pests.
Step number eight, attach new frag plugs.
Choose the appropriately sized frag plug.
If you want the coral to grow out onto the frag plug,
especially if it's an encrusting type coral,
then you may wanna choose a plug that's slightly larger
so it has room to grow.
Apply a generous amount of that extra thick superglue
to the center of the plug.
Give it a quick spritz with the Insta Set
and then place the coral on top.
Hold it in place for about 10 to 15 seconds
and it should be set.
Give it a quick dip in the fourth bowl and then move
it to your frag rack in your display tank
or your quarantine tank, or wherever
the final destination is.
For those corals that still have part of the original
frag plugs attached, that's not a big deal at all.
All you have to do is glue the old frag plug
to the new frag plug.
For soft corals, such as leather corals, you either
can leave it on that original piece of rubble rock.
You can take that piece of rubble rock and glue
it to a larger piece of rubble rock.
You can take that piece of rubble rock,
glue it to a frag plug, or if you did go ahead and cut off
that leather coral added space, then you have to use
the rubber band trick.
Since you can't glue a soft coral to a piece of rubble rock
or to a frag plug, what you have to do is take a rubber band
and gently wrap it around the leather coral.
Over the course of two to three weeks,
it will likely attach to that coral.
And then you can remove the rubber band,
but you have to be really careful.
If you put the rubber band on too hard at all,
it will just pull directly through that leather coral.
But if it's not on hard enough, then it won't have enough
contact to attach to that piece of rubble.
You have to find that good middle ground.
That epoxy we had you purchase in that last video
is really there to help you just in case superglue,
isn't getting the job done.
If you need to use the epoxy to create more structure
around your coral, it's there for you to use.
Step number nine, quarantine for one to two months.
Start by giving your corals one to two weeks to fully
recover in their new home.
Visually inspect your corals as often as you can.
Every day is best.
And if you notice any new pests, pull them out
and manually remove them.
After a few weeks have past, if you notice a lot of pests
that just won't remove during that first dip,
it's now safe to go ahead and remove them and repeat the dip
process again before putting them back
into your quarantine tank.
And step number 10 is just to rinse your gear.
Salt water corrodes things over time.
So always give them a fresh water rinse
and then put them away somewhere completely separate
from your kitchen gear.
If you just paid attention to all 10 of those steps
and you're saying, "Matthew, I'm gonna do everything,
but I'm not gonna put them in the quarantine tank."
It's fair enough.
You may be able to skip step eight and move your corals
directly to your display tank.
How do you do that?
Well, that is for next episode.
As always everyone, thanks for watching.
Happy reefing, be well.
We'll see you next time.