Why not just take that rock with it? Rock is a couple buks a pound?
I had a rock with this gorgeous skyblue and twisted Acropora on it maybe a foot across. On the same rock were some bright orange zoanthids, and a pink and orange large colony of M, digitata....the color was shocking. Thing is, the zoanthids were overgrowing both colonies, and I only had the tips of the digitata showing. I took the three pound rock, snipped all the digitata tips and reglued them together on another rock knowing in six months it would look the same as it always had,, and broke my gorgeous blue Acropora. That same Acropora has already grown tremendously and in a few months will look just like it once did. The zoanthids I put in the sump. I actually did chisel off the base of the blue Acropora and made a nice frag from it, already forming axial corallites. The only downside is I am out a three pound piece of rock that is now rubble for amphipods in the sump, and I lost about three inches of the original digitata from the zoanthids growing over it.
Net loss, nothing. Net gain, one blue acropora fragment, some sump rubble, saved the digitata entirely, and a slight loss of regrowth time. Saved the commensal crabs, all worms in the colony, even the sponges in the zoanthid colony. Total time it took? three hours. Now, in the scheme of things, three hours to save everything means something to me. I even save amphipods that jump off corals onto my hand.
But, if you want to do it your way, its your tank. Do what you want.
