Encrusting corals growth

[Gtinnel]

Several of my encrusting corals have began to grow into each other and where they touched the tissue on one of the corals died. Do I need to do anything about the dead part of the coral, like chip it off of the rock, or just leave it alone? Will it eventually get encrusted by the more dominate coral, which will drive the other coral back even farther?

Here is a pic I took where you can see that my mystic sunset monti and my meteor shower cyphastrea grew into each other, and obviously the cyphastrea won that battle. I'm always in awe of the tanks where people have corals that seem to grow right beside each other without any kind of warfare.

 

[blaxsun]

Give them some additional separation and it will eventually grow over in time.

 

[Gtinnel]

Give them some additional separation and it will eventually grow over in time.

I'm honestly not sure how to give them more separation, it's not like a branching coral that I can easily break off of the rockwork and move. When I placed these corals I greatly under estimated how quickly they'd grow.

 

[blaxsun]

I'm honestly not sure how to give them more separation, it's not like a branching coral that I can easily break off of the rockwork and move. When I placed these corals I greatly under estimated how quickly they'd grow.

If you can't move them you may have to just let them duke it out. Don't beat yourself up too much - it's very hard to predict which corals are going to grow fast and to what extent.

 

[Gtinnel]

If you can't move them you may have to just let them duke it out. Don't beat yourself up too much - it's very hard to predict which corals are going to grow fast and to what extent.

No worry about me beating myself up over them, they could completely die off and I'd just see as new real-estate for other corals. They did grow surprisingly fast, but I should've figured out they would since they're incredibly cheap corals and usually cheap corals grow fast.

 

[ou12004]

I have put Reef putty between certain corals then just pop it off and I have a new frag once it grows over. Keeps them from fighting and I get an encrusted frag