When a coral grows too big?

[smokinreefer]

That's a tough one. I love a tank with big grown-out colonies.

It's tough to hack up a grown-out colony like that and have it look like its former self.

Personally, I'd either cut it back to about 1/4 size and let it regrow, or trim it a bit and mount a bunch of sun corals below it. It would look great in your setup.

[Reef_kid]

Hey, I love breaking down big corals!
Awesome post, Just remove the under "petals"as large sheets. take it to the local reef shop. I am sure you can get a couple hundred dollars in store credits for some new coral to replace . just kept the crown or a singe portion. that way you don't have to really frag it and sell it out individually. You can get ride of it in "wholesale". Call around to the shops.

[Phormium]

Thanks to all above and the PM’s I received. It’s done and now I wonder what I was hesitating for. It looks so much better now. It was impossible to lift out, so I had to do the pruning while it was inside the tank—good time to have at least 3 hands!
I pruned at least half of the overall volume and chipped off the dead “stem”. It’s now lower by almost a foot and looks really good as I can finally see it from above.
Thanks again for the instructions and advice, the scale of it is so much better and now I can confidently prune in the future.
This forum can be real valuable as a resource!

[msjboy]

I saw a guy with a silmilar sized green monti..maybe even bigger under my lights…nothing else in tank as he was getting rid of it. Not sure what happened to,it but he was going away all the pieces that had broken off. If I recall, it was even denser in the number of petals. Tank was a big plexiglass one probably at least 150 gallons.

[Ken]

Thanks for the update, sure would be nice to see what it looks like now, dropping it a foot down is quite significant. Cheers from Ken