[Spick]

My newest coral, is a Rusty Gorgonian. It's a little big for my aquarium, so i would like to split it and distribute it through the aquarium in smaller counts. and also sell some of it to others. How would i go about splitting my gorgonian? an i ksit split off any branch or should i be splitting it from the bottom? any comments would help

[scubadude]

Hey Spick

Never heard the common name "rusty gorgonian" before

Just curious as to where you bought this gorgonian. The only info I came up with is info from Liveaquaria.com which gives a very generalistic information on this coral. And they even categorize it as a gorgonia sp. which basically means they can sell any gorgonian under this category. There description is that it is a carribean

Here is a quote from their website

It is more challenging to maintain this species, as they require supplemental feeding several times per week. This gorgonian is photosynthetic and requires a moderate amount of light depending on the amount of filter feeding food that is available. It also requires a stronger water flow and the addition of iodine, calcium, strontium, and other trace elements to the water.

I like that they put that its a photosynthetic coral which does give you some hope. but the description of it is very vague still IMO. If you could get a couple of really good pictures I could take a stab at a more specific ID on it which would be the first step in finding out more about the coral. But good flow, food, and lighting are a good place to start in general with these corals in general....but of course thats with most any corals

As far as fragging it you can cut it (with a clean razor blade or snips if its branchy) then strip some of the skin from the mounting area leaving the main branch part and stick a good inch+ of the stripped branch part in a hole where you would like to mount it and secure with some 2 part marine epoxy

[Spick]

I had gone to Liveaquaria to read up on it, and then cmae on here to get more info, but thats alright trial and error i guess. I did frag yesterday, it seems to be doing jsut fine the polyps are spiking out. So so far so good... thnx

[Spick]

Originally Posted by scubadude

Hey Spick

If you could get a couple of really good pictures I could take a stab at a more specific ID on it which would be the first step in finding out more about the coral.

Here are a couple descent pix of it. Let me know what you think thnx! Dude

[scubadude]

Still kind of hard to tell with out the polyp extension or closeups. But you can tell that the gorg has lateral branching which should be able to narrow it down some. There are 2 that come to mind now that you could do some searching of pics on the web and comparison

Leptogorgia virgulata
Pseudoplexaura sp.