A few days ago Thrive Aquatics sent me a sample of their Frag Plug Tree, but what’s frag storage without some primo frag plugs to put on it? Lucky for me they also included some of their trick little Coral Plugs complete with custom tags for marking them. Thrive went the extra mile to make their plugs stand out by casting them out of ceramic, including a tagging system and reinventing the shape to look more natural.

The dome shape on the top of the disc is the first give away that these are not normal plugs, but the tagging hole and gluing hole really drives it home. Included in the package were some tags that can be written on as well as some custom tags to show what they can do. Both types are a simple design that slides through a hole in the perimeter of the plug disc and then adheres back on itself. The custom Tyvex tags are a really nice touch, and from the looks of it, they can be ordered with anything from a company name to a custom coral name. The included tags that can be written on don’t share the same quality material, but they should be very useful for those fraggers that don’t want to commit to a label before ordering their plugs.

Naturally after getting these I needed to do some fragging, but with the neat little tagging system, I didn’t want to just hack up any old coral. In perfect timing I just happened to have a colony of the brand new Golden Empire zoas, so I decided to match up this new release coral with the new Coral Plugs and make some limited edition frags. Thrive Aquatics’ tagging system came in handy, and made it easy to number each of the limited frags cut. Glue gets great purchase with the included hole at the top of the dome, and even though they are ceramic, the surface is rough enough for glue to grab on to well. Thrive’s Coral Plugs come in three different sizes, so they should work well for corals of various sizes.

These may not be the biggest product to hit the scene recently, but like I always say, small simple innovation goes a lot further than big fancy failures!