Well, I finally got around to downsizing the skeleton on the Lobo that I got from ASD a few weeks back. The skeleton was massive on this guy, and I've been having troubles trying to figure out where to put it with all of that skeleton. It was kind of like Vanilla Ice's hair back in the day.
So, I went out and got a diamond blade for the dremel today, and decided to take a little bit off of the bottom. I'd asked, both in my tank thread, and here in the LPS forum, and even dug up an old thread where someone else had asked the same thing without reply, so this was going to be a bit of an experiment. I decided I was going to try about an inch down from the edge of the polyp, so I grabbed the coral, grabbed some water, and out onto the back deck I went.
Yep - that is a dinosaur eating garden gnomes. I'm a paleontologist, and I hate garden gnomes. Anyhow - I made that first cut at a slight downward angle about an inch down from the polyp margin tissue because I know that the coralites in LPS are usually cone shaped and I wanted to minimize any tissue bisection.
I kept stopping, swishing it around in the water to keep the skeleton cool and the clean, looking for any color inside of the skeleton, and sniffing for the telltale 'cooking coral' smell. None at all on the first polyp. So I continued on to the other two in the same manner.
Got it cut on the outer three faces, then gave it a bit of a shallow cut on the inner face (again, swishing every few seconds in tank water), gave it a bit of a pull, and off the bottom bit came.
Here are the two bottom pieces of skeleton that I cut off. No live tissue whatsoever. So to answer the question I posed about how much old skeleton can be cut safely off of a thick-fragged Lobo - an inch down from the live tissue margin, and at a slight downward angle appears to be safe!
About an hour later - like nothing had even happened (terrible non-filtered phone lighting).
