[Delphinus]

I see this as coral gardening. See, for me, I hate the look of frag shelves in a display tank. If all I have are little frags though then glueing those in place without the plugs, for me, has not been as successful in frag retention than has been glueing the plugs down. Snails, clumsy fish, urchins .. it is a conspiracy of pretty much anything that moves in my tank (including the water now that I think of it) to find loosely attached corals and remove them from their mounting points. So I epoxy the frack out of the plug while minimizing contact with the coral itself. Yeah, it means that I have plugs on the rock, but, 1) they get covered in coraline in time and it's less conspicuous, 2) in some cases the corals have grown over the mounts and you can't tell (no really, you can't tell. Maybe not that many qualify in this category but it's nonzero), and 3) in the very beginning of this thoughtstream I said something about coral gardening, the thing is, this is coral gardening and part of gardening is pruning and replanting and the like, if the coral does well over time then it's likely that it will get removed and the plug, if still conspicuously sticking out by then, can simply be removed and the coral and/or whatever frags can be remounted using other means (it's been years since I was at this point but I fantasize one day I'll have a tank like my 75g where I couldn't even give SPS frags away for free because the growth was that fast).