large decomposing hole in Sarcophyton!

[bprewit]

Well crap man I ordered a few things from Marine Depot and they didnt ship very well. The xenia melted withing a couple of days (not good shippers plus UPS guy screwed me over) and now im betting the Sarcophyton is on its way out. I looked this guy over a bit when i took him from the shipping bag and put him in the tank but didnt look near good enough as there is an obvious large decomposing hole in the bottom of its head/disk/big round thing polyps come out of. I got this guy 4 days ago and he finally started to open its polyps a bit yesterday but nothing amazing, only about half of it opened up. It has stayed drooped over so today figured maybe move it down a bit in the tank and see if it would be happy easier. When I picked it up lots of crap started falling of and tank was suddenly pretty dirty. I turned the guy over and my best description is: Looking underneat where the stalk and head come together, about half of the stalk is dead leaving a large gaping hole on the underside. This tissue is falling off pretty easily and dosent look like its going to stop anytime soon. My question is should I frag this guy now or wait and see what happens? I can cut his head off, split it in two pieces cutting around the bad tissue and make two frags, or just cut the head off where the tissue is bad and glue the whole head to a rock and let it go from there. Which should I do???? Any advice is really appreciated!

[Richard]

IMO you should toss it. A dead/dying sarcophyton is never a good thing for your tank.

If there is a "good" portion of the head you can frag it off and it will grow into a nice piece.

[Tim Marvin]

I agree with Richard. Serious pollution if you let it go.

[bprewit]

Well I went ahead and cut the guy up. I got rid of all the bad tissue and cut the head into 4 different pieces. Wasnt real big to begin with. 1 hour later all 4 pieces have polyps open and dosent look too ****ed that I cut him into pieces.

[Tim Marvin]

Well, in a few weeks you'll have 4 happy little leathers.

[MikeP]

These things are pretty hardy if you isolate the affected tissue - I usually do like Tim and Richard said and cut away healthy tissue and make new frags - a quick bath in a lugols / new sea water solution with a small powerhead works wonders at getting rid of any remaining bacteria.

Although we don't often it is a really good idea to quarantine new corals just like fish - I have paid the price recently with a rock I got from a local store here that had something funky on it that grew and turned into a nasty brown jelly infection which damaged a nearby trachyphyllia before I discovered it in my nano. I won't mention the store's name but suffice to say anything I buy from there in the future will get an extended quarantine and / dip.