How long does it take for a ric to split

mmm33732

Member
not exactly answering your question here, but a simple quick slit with a razor blade makes it pretty instant. and they grow back whole within a few weeks. but naturally, ive wondered the same thing. i would assume it all depends on the exact species, amount of food uptake, lighting, pretty much everything is a variable. "ideal conditions" vary slightly from everyone you ask.
 

bonebrake

Active Member
To completely split can take a long time (3-6 months), but they can form a new mouth relatively frequently (1-2 months). In my limited experience with ricordea (two years) I have found that for the average hobbyist letting them reproduce naturally appears to result in larger albeit less numerous ricordea than cutting them up and waiting for them to regrow.
You will definitely have more ricordea if you frag because they heal easily as long as they stay under bright light (a freshly fragged ricordea will bleach and die even if it rolls behind a rock or in the shade for one day). However, a ricordea polyp the size of a dime takes a year or more to be 2-3 inches fully expanded.
It would take a long time commitment (two or three years) to make 300-500 hundred frags from 50-60 large polyp ricordea that are 3-5 inches and wait for them to grow to a size that they would be easy to sell. They do not need a section of mouth in order to be fragged, cutting off just a few bubbles will result in a new ricordea with a mouth eventually. My smallest frag of ricordea was a section of about ten bubbles the size of my pinky nail without a mouth that grew to ~1.5 inches fully expanded with a single mouth in a little over a year at which point I sold it.
 
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