SPS Battle Royale! -- How to correct and how to avoid?

[Neuratox]

Things seem to be going really well in my tank the last few months. About 6 months ago I bough a few nice acros to add to the small starter collection that I had. I only had a small area that had enough PAR to grow sps, so I spaced all the frags I had with about 2-4" of space between them. You probably see where this is going...

Several of them have encrusted on their rocks to the point where they are ~1-2mm from touching. I've been reading that they are going to have serious issues when they do and that I may start losing them. I'm thinking about just cutting some frag plugs in half and forming a little wall between them all for the time being. How do you guys handle this when it happens to you?

Also, I'll be transferring all of the coral I have (mainly sps) over to a new tank once it finishes up with the uglies and hits the 6 month mark (presuming that I see coralline growth by that point). I suspect any mature reef that is a few years old will run into this sort of problem at some point, so what do you do when corals that were once 6" apart (is that enough?) start to encroach upon each other's space especially if it is encrusting rather than branching into the other's area?

I have a psammacora and a pavona that have maintained a respectful distance from one another, creating a winding boarder between them. I suspect some warfare is going on, but neither coral shows any signs of harm or stress and both are still growing rapidly. I assumed that was how this would go in most instances... How can I set up the next tank to make sure that I don't have problems?

 

[face]

I like to mount them on a large base so I can move them around as needed. The aquadomes work well for that.

 

[Adept Corals]

Things seem to be going really well in my tank the last few months. About 6 months ago I bough a few nice acros to add to the small starter collection that I had. I only had a small area that had enough PAR to grow sps, so I spaced all the frags I had with about 2-4" of space between them. You probably see where this is going...

Several of them have encrusted on their rocks to the point where they are ~1-2mm from touching. I've been reading that they are going to have serious issues when they do and that I may start losing them. I'm thinking about just cutting some frag plugs in half and forming a little wall between them all for the time being. How do you guys handle this when it happens to you?

Also, I'll be transferring all of the coral I have (mainly sps) over to a new tank once it finishes up with the uglies and hits the 6 month mark (presuming that I see coralline growth by that point). I suspect any mature reef that is a few years old will run into this sort of problem at some point, so what do you do when corals that were once 6" apart (is that enough?) start to encroach upon each other's space especially if it is encrusting rather than branching into the other's area?

I have a psammacora and a pavona that have maintained a respectful distance from one another, creating a winding boarder between them. I suspect some warfare is going on, but neither coral shows any signs of harm or stress and both are still growing rapidly. I assumed that was how this would go in most instances... How can I set up the next tank to make sure that I don't have problems?

I have seen some people drilling the rocks so they could just put the frags on larger grow out disks. Then glueing a rod to the disk like a large frag plug and mount the corals this way. It allows the corals to be moved around also makes trimming and fragging a breeze.