Wes set up his iPhone 4 to video some of the breakdown. If it gets edited down to something usable, it'll be posted on our Reef Addicts YouTube channel.
With a long final stare at my reef, I took a deep breath and willed myself to pull out the first coral. It may seem dramatic, but as a general rule I try to keep my hands out of the tank as much as possible, and even now I couldn’t help resisting the inevitable teardown of a perfectly functioning ecosystem. Starting with the corals near the surface, I certainly appreciated the size of some of the colonies that had grown in from tiny fragments over the years. They were carefully lifted out of the tank and passed to a pair of waiting hands that would lower them into the water-filled vats nearby. SPS were put in one vat, and LPS corals in the other.
The first coral came out perfectly, still holding the shape it had formed as it grew on the sides of the overflow. The A. formosa was a 2” frag secured to an aqua-mag originally, and the magnet is still embedded in the coral’s core.
The parent colony was pulled out in its entirety, just barely clearing the space between the upper wall and the top edge of the tank. It was later inserted into an empty ARM container used as a pseudo vase to stand it up and retain space for more livestock in the SPS vat. The water line was just barely above the tips of this coral.
The tabling A. plana was taken out one layer at a time. Areas that had been shaded by the layer above were dead, essentially bone white where tissue had once been. These lower sections were sacrificed and used as a support structure for the living shelf above. The leading edges continued to grow since they received light and better flow.
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