Who Gives A Fish Forums

I picked up a small 2 headed frogspawn frag a few years back. It was this awesome fluorescent green with purple tips - back then, that was enough to make it stand out. Nowadays, I guess it'd be called a Purple tipped Hulk Frogspawn or something like that.

Anyway, my tank was still getting settled, and the parameters were all over the place, so I lost both heads. I just left the frag on the rocks, dealing with other tank issues. Then, a month or so later, I noticed this tiny green speck on the skeleton - just a single polyp, but it was a start.

Fast forward a bit, and that little speck turned into a small cluster of polyps - I'd say about 4 by then. It was looking like a little hot cross bun, and I was stoked. About 1.5 years later, the new head had grown to the size of a golf ball when it was fully inflated.

Then, the other night, I saw something weird - one of the frogspawn's arms had something heavy in it. Took a closer look, and it looks like the arm's got some coral skeleton growing inside it, right at the end. The new skeleton isn't attached to the main one, though - it's just hanging off the polyp's tissue.

Here's a photo. You can see the tissue with the skeleton dangling down. It looks like it's attached in the picture, but it's not - it just flops around in the current.

What do you guys think? Is this thing gonna drop off and become a new frag?

Honestly, I'm stumped - never seen anything like it. Guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens next.

I recall seeing a post about coral reproduction methods a few months back, possibly on this forum, though I'm not entirely sure. It mentioned something about "dripping" corals, which seems vaguely relevant to your situation. A quick Google search for "drip coral" might turn up something useful.

Thanks for the tip, Dynamox. I did some digging and found a thread on Reef Central by BankoLite that describes a similar situation. My coral seems to be growing the skeleton before detaching, whereas hers did it afterwards. Fingers crossed I can snag the polyp once it drops off and before it gets lost in the rockwork.