Brightwell Aquatics is jumping into the coral propagation angle of the marine aquarium hobby; yesterday we told you about the new fluorescent super glue REEF Fuze and today it’s all about the frag plugs and things to glue our corals to.
Unlike most of the frag plugs in the reef aquarium world today which are made of ceramic, the REEF Frag & REEF Plates are made of high-purity aragonite starting material. Brightwell describes the makeup of their new propagation material as “foamed aragonite” which we will infer to mean a fine-grained aragonite held together probably with resin in a process that fosters porosity.
We commend Brightwell Aquatics for investing in a few different shapes of frag plugs in their REEF Frag line. There are hemispherical plugs called HemiXSpheres which are designed to grow multiple micro colonies on the same plug, such as zoanthids or branching corals. The Hexidiscs are designed to rest on a flat surface and pack in as many individual pieces in a given area.
Clam Hammocks are self explanatory, with a nice concave shape to cradle our Tridacna clams until they decide to fasten down with their byssus threads. The REEF Plate is perhaps our favorite in the bunch of substrates, as it not only acts as a large growing surface for developing broodstock colonies of corals, but can also be used in a biological filtration capacity.
Better yet, the REEF Plates could be used to tile the bottom of an aquarium creating a natural aragonite hardbottom, while not blowing around in the strong flow that corals really need to thrive. Overall what we find particularly noteworthy about the whole REEF Frag and REEF Plate line is the conscientious effort to develop a full line of complimentary plugs and substrates – there’s something for everyone’s favorite coral to propagate.
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