A lot of people don’t realize the importance of dipping Corals because they fail to realize how many pests that have the potential to come in on a frag plug or disc then you introduce that frag into your main display which could potentially be disastrous. Nice tutorial Matthew. 😊
I don't fully understand why we should remove the original frag plug if we're coral dipping them anyway. 😅 Aren't we unnecessarily stressing the coral by doing that?
I keep my plugs, soak them in bleach for a day when I have a collection. Then I rinse them thoroughly and dry them out completely. One day they will come in handy for me ;)
For LPS, can you skip gluing to a frag plug and glue directly onto the rock work instead, or is there a benefit with glueing to a plug? I think I remember Ryan saying they can be an eye sore and you can glue the coral using glue and coral gum to the rock work directly...
I’m bought a red & green war coral from my Local fish Store, but I need to be careful about pests cuz I see lots of bubble algae, aiptasia in their tanks 😅 So here I am watching this video as I’m dipping, cleaning, searching for pests on the coral 😂
Curious why this is even necessary since unlike full blown quarantine for a fish, this seems far simpler. Aren’t vendors and fish stores as motivated, if not more motivated than us to prevent their entire system from being invaded with pests and wiping out their system? Shouldn’t they already be doing this themselves? Back when I had a reef tank 14 years ago, I’d just pop corals in and perhaps I was just lucky, but never ran into an issue. In your experience, are vendors and LFS really that poor at maintaining their systems that this is required?
And why do you have to remove the old plug if you already scrubbed it and dipped the coral to remove hitchhikers? What’s so bad about the plug or rock the coral came on?
I would like to use live rock but without the pests ( bristle worms etc) could I dip liverock with coraldip without killing the good bacteria and start my tank with it?
While you might be able to get a zoa off a plug using a sharp razor blade, they can be put into the encrusting category. In most cases, we just try to remove as much of the plug as we can, dip the coral, and call it good 😁
So you temperature acclimate, drip acclimate and then wash and scrub them, soak them in dip for 20-30 minutes, rinse, glue, inspect, rinse... At that point it's been a minimum of 30 minutes and potentially up to an hour since you started the dipping process with your "acclimated" corals. Pretty sure any temperature acclimation is long gone by then and most likely any drip acclimation benefits as well. Really see no value in acclimating the corals before doing all the rest of it. Just get straight into the cleaning and dipping.
