Coral Propagation

Chapter 1: Why Fragging Fails: The Hidden Mistakes That Kill Frags

Every frag that dies in your care dies for one of three reasons: you cut it wrong, you put it in the wrong environment, or you let something in that shouldn't be there. That's it. After a decade of fragging at the bench, thousands of cuts, and a graveyard of early mistakes that still makes me wince, I can tell you that the coral itself is rarely the problem. The problem is always the system around the cut.

Think of fragging as a relay race with five legs: donor, cut, heal, attach, grow. Each leg hands off to the next, and if any single handoff is fumbled, the frag doesn't finish. The donor colony must be healthy enough to survive the trauma. The cut must be clean and appropriate for that coral's growth form. The healing phase requires exact water parameters and chemical dips. The attachment must be mechanically secure and biologically compatible. And the grow-out phase demands lighting, flow, and nutrition that match the frag's needs at that specific moment in its recovery.

Here's what most hobbyists get wrong: they treat these five phases as one continuous process with the same conditions throughout. They cut, glue, and drop the frag into the display tank, then wonder why it's brown and shrinking three weeks later. The frag that survives its first 48 hours but dies on day 21 didn't die from the cut. It died from a failed handoff