Grafting a Grafted Monti

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#1


I have been growing out a few of the grafted Monti colonies for several years. My Monti mountain started as frags of Red, Grafted, Purple, Leng Sy, and an Aussie Blue rim. As the mountain has grown over the past years some plates outgrew others and now I have to trim them because there just isn't room to go further. Last year I broke out a section of grafted and through it in the outside frag tank. Well I was delighted to see that the grafted cap actually fused back into a green cap. Now a little over a year later that section has grown out and turned into a really neat piece. The photos of the double graft were shot under blue light outside. The areas that look purple are actually red. But the sections that look red are bright orange. And the stripes running up through the purple areas are gold. Really neat to see what mother nature with a touch of lazy reefer can accomplish.


Dave B














 
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#6
Ausndani7, I don't do anything except keep the corals alive. I have grown caps in multicolor clusters for years. And usually they come up against one another and one grows over the other. There are several 'wives tales' as to who and how grafted/fused the monti caps originally. WWC has one variety with different color polyps. Unique Corals (where I got mine) has a different one. The 2 colors in the grafted just randomly grow. In my outside tanks in the sunlight the 2 colors are undefined as they grow. But once your put them in lower level light the 2 distinct colors start growing like crazy.

The piece in this photo was a grafted that when it bumped into the next cap colony instead o bumping they grew together.

This morning when moving some other colonies around outside I found another large grafted colony (how messed up am I that I 'find' a 8" grafted monti colony... haha) and it has 2 edges that have fused into another monti cap.

There has been lots of interest in this, and I am going to try to do a youtube video this weekend to try to show and explain to people better what's going on.


Dave B
 
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#7
Wow very interesting Dave. So when you graft 2 colors together they start growing into multi color? I have 2 different color monti maybe I should give it a try ;)
 

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