Corals don’t grow linearly, they double every x months and the x depends on on your skills at coral husbandry. The reason you might want to grow out from many small pieces of acropora is often coral frags stop growing vertically once they’re cut because they want to anchor down, and they will only grow new branches from new encrustment.
The question is then, in your opinion/experience, will that pearlberry grow faster if you frag it into smaller pieces or leave it as is? Or do you think it wouldn’t grow faster under either circumstance?It takes a long time to grow out a micro frag. I can see microfrags working if you have multiples of them that will fuse, but if you only have one then it takes a long while. I have the RR firecracker and the JD, which are small 1/4" - 3/8" microfrags. The firecracker has yet to encrust the 1" plug that it was mounted on in the 4 months that I've had it. The JD is newer and will probably take 4-5 months to even encrust a 3/4" - 1" area. I know someone that also picked up the JD and it took his 5 months to encrust 3/4" plug.
Usually this is case but not always. Take for instance, this is the ORA pearlberry on 4/22/18.
The center branch can be seen and the encrusting base grows out and new tips shoots out mostly from the encrusting base.
While most of the grow is on the peripheral encrusting base, the center tip is still growing. Here it is today with the picture centered around the center branch, where it's shooting out additional branches from (5 at the moment).
Awesome experiment. Very interested in the results.There's ~1/8" difference between the two frags. The one on the rocks gets more flow so it's thicker in comparison, whereas the one in lower flow is more spread out in structure.
Can't be at the same height since that's a 3" disk there that I can't get onto the rockwork. Both frags were growing at the same pace even though they are at different heights. Colors are more muddy on the lower piece even though it has kept up with growth. This was a set of pics taken awhile back with both frags on the same day.