Man postpones retirement after "discovering coral fragging"

[eamike261]

Just though I'd share this interesting (highly upvoted) Reddit post today. It's fun to see our hobby in the eyes of the public. The clickbait is strong and implies that the researcher literally "discovered the process of fragging corals" which is silly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/a2p7qn/man_postpones_retirement_to_save_reefs_after_he/

However, I do strongly support the publication of scientific research relating to saltwater reefing. It's always beneficial to have experimental evidence backing up our anecdotal evidence. This was the paper partially authored by the man mentioned in the Reddit post.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4614846/

 

[Chris Baker]

My understanding is that his discovery is not fragging but the spacing of frags in proximity to each other so that they grow and fuse together. This allowed them to reach sizes that promote sexual reproduction and would otherwise take years of growth. That was my understanding anyway. Happy to be corrected by someone better versed in the science.

 

[eamike261]

The "fusion" of the frags is just a product of desiring colonies since the goal of his experiment/work is to help repopulate colonies in ocean reefs. If you start with a single 100 square inch colony of encrusting SPS and chop it into 20 frags near each other, wait a year, you would have one colony again but it would be much bigger than if you had just let the 100 square inch colony grow on it's own.

I'd say the only potentially interesting intriguing result is the evidence that size of the frags impacted the overall growth rate (but I think we anecdotally know that as reefers). Basically, there is a limit to how small you want to cut your frags if your goal is increase overall growth rate.