help! pulsing xenia growing like crazy

[new reefer in michigan]

Hi everyone. I got some pulsing xenia a couple of weeks ago and now it is starting to grow pretty fast. It is getting close to my anenome and some other corals also. This coral grows like crazy. I need to frag it but since i'm still pretty new to all this I have never fragged a coral before. Can you guys give me some pointers on the best way to frag a xenia is. Thank you!

 

[tetra]

Move the rock of xenia to the back of the tank and let them climb onto the back. Once on there you can scrape it off with a credit card and tie it to another rock. You can also put a rock that you want them to grow on and let them spread on there and use a razor blade to cut them off to separate the two colonies.

One More Thing, make sure you use a high limit credit card, one with at least $1000 limit

 

[wreckscuba]

Did you get this from pets and things in saline? As I work in AnnArbor. Have sold them some frags in January.I have one rock thats covered with the stuff. I keep it next to the glass and just scrape it off with a credit card

 

[somethings fishy]

I have a ton of xenia I frag all the time. I personally like to put rocks right next to or even on top (depending onlocation etc.) and let it spread naturaly and break or slice them apart. I haven't had good luck trying to attach slimy pieces of xenia to rocks manually.

 

[fishfarmer]

My Xenia elongata (brown) is pretty easy to propagate. It usually crawls to the nearest rock where you can cut it from the original rock. I try to catch it before it does this though. I like taking a double stalk of the colony, cut it near the base with sharp scissors and lay the fork on a rock. Loosely rubberband between the fork. The two heads should attach and split making two separate colonies.

My Xenia umbellata (white) is a little trickier. It doesn't seem to creep like the other xenia. It also seems to take longer to attach and sometimes splits prematurely when I use a rubberband. I've been taking cut stalks and sticking a toothpick through the base and rubberbanding the toothpick to a rock so the base touches the rock.

 

[davelin315]

Xenia elongata is very very resilient, and you really don't need to be careful about how you cull it. I have used the following methods (starting with early on when it was so precious to me, going to what I do now): razor blade to cut it, rubber bands, placing it next to other objects, using scissors to just snip it off, and now, I just tear the damn things away from wherever they are and hope that I get the base off of the rock.

Don't worry too much. If it's spreading, no matter how bad you mangle it, it'll recover very very quickly. Some of the pieces I pull off end up as thin as a piece of paper, but they always come back within a few hours.