Coral frags on rock??

[trsmith18]

Does any company sell coral frags on rocks? I HATE the look of coral plugs and refuse to put them on my rock.

I know I can remove them from the plug and transfer them to a piece rock upon arrive, but this is another step in the process I frankly don’t want to deal with this.

just trying to save a minor annoyance and additional trauma to the coral

 

[blaxsun]

Cut the frag stems off and glue them flat to the rock. In a few months you won't even see them.

 

[Pale Morning1]

Blaxsun is correct. Here is one that I left the plug and stem on. Actually gives the coral a nice shape as it spreads onto the rocks. You can’t see any part of the plug anymore.

 

[Reefer6]

What coral is that?

 

[Pale Morning1]

Green Sympodium. Inexpensive, think I paid $23 for it but looks nice. It has started to grow really well recently.

 

[trsmith18]

Awesome, but doesn’t answer the original question.

 

[rhostam]

The answer is no. Frag plugs serve a purpose to vendors. They help with farm arrangement and consistent sizing and surface area. Rock fragments (unless also artificially created) would not offer that. Spend the one calorie, remove the frag from its plug, and put it on your rubble fragment.

I don't remove coral from plugs until they are well acclimated and visibly "happy." I usually wait a few weeks. Then I remove them from their plugs and place them near their original acclimation location.

*correction: I forget, some LFS and online vendors sell colonies directly from the ocean - those often come on their original rock chunks. But these generally are not frags (that I've ever seen).

 

[Tonycass12]

Your probably not going to find anything like that unless you are buying from someone doing a teardown. Outside of shrroms and zooanthinds that get propagated in rubble from time to time. Most corals are propagated onto plates or plugs for the ease of movement and being able to be tightly packed in racks. As others have said cut the stem and glue flat. The base will encrust over in a few months. Only other option is to cut the coral away from plug and fix it to the rock. All these corals had the stem cut from the plugs and were glued down, a few months later and boom no more plugs.

 

[Sharkbait19]

There are plugs designed like rocks - usually at petcos. The ones I had wound up being more inconvenient than the plugs.
I don’t like how plugs look either - eventually I got tired of hiding them and found it really is a lot easier to break them off. You’ll be spending less time gluing the coral to a rock than you will figuring out where to put a bulky rock.

 

[Tonycass12]

The answer is no. Frag plugs serve a purpose to vendors. They help with farm arrangement and consistent sizing and surface area. Rock fragments (unless also artificially created) would not offer that. Spend the one calorie, remove the frag from its plug, and put it on your rubble fragment.

I don't remove coral from plugs until they are well acclimated and visibly "happy." I usually wait a few weeks. Then I remove them from their plugs and place them near their original acclimation location.

*correction: I forget, some LFS and online vendors sell colonies directly from the ocean - those often come on their original rock chunks. But these generally are not frags (that I've ever seen).

Most of those maricultured colonies ive seen come in are on 3 or 4 inch disks lately. This could be different from true wild harvested colonies although you just as likely to get a coral with no base.