Dipping corals is one of those jobs that is genuinely easy once, and genuinely reliable only when it is a routine. The difference between reefers who never get a pest outbreak and reefers who fight them constantly is almost never the product. It is whether the process is the same every single time.
Here is the routine, start to finish.
Before the coral arrives: set up the station
Everything ready before the box is open. Scrambling is how mistakes happen.
- Three containers. One for the dip, two for rinses. Cheap plastic food containers are perfect. Label them and use them for nothing else.
- A turkey baster or large pipette for agitation and blowing out crevices.
- Tweezers or a small pair of bone cutters for removing hitchhikers and trimming plugs.
- A heater or just a matched-temperature water source so nothing in the process is more than a couple of degrees off your tank.
- Fresh tank water for the rinses, drawn at the start.
- Your dip, measured according to its instructions, not eyeballed.
Step 1: acclimate first, dip second
A coral straight out of a shipping bag is already stressed and probably at a different temperature and pH than your system. Float or drip it to temperature first. Dipping a cold, shocked coral is how you lose corals to the dip and then blame the dip.
Step 2: inspect before you treat
Look at it dry-eyed for thirty seconds. Where is the tissue receding? Are there egg clusters on the skeleton? Is there anything feathery green on the plug? What you see now tells you what to look for in the cup, and whether this coral needs a second round.
Step 3: dip
Follow the dose and duration for the dip you are using — for Bubble Bath, that is in the instructions and detailed in the guide below. Two rules apply to every dip on the market:
Agitate. Gently swish the coral, and use the baster to push water through the branches and across the base. A dip that just sits there is doing a fraction of its job. Most pests are dislodged mechanically and killed chemically, in that order.
Do not free-style the dose. More concentrated and longer does not mean cleaner. It means burnt tissue. If a pest survives a correct dip, the answer is another correct dip in five days, not a stronger one today.
Step 4: blow out the base
The most-skipped and most-important step. Eggs and pests hide on the underside of the plug, in the crevices at the base, and in old skeleton. Blast all of it with the baster while the coral is still in the dip. If the plug looks suspicious, mount the coral on a fresh plug and throw the old one away — a $0.50 plug is not worth a quarantine.
Step 5: rinse twice, and never return the water
Two rinses in clean, temperature-matched tank water. Then dump the dip water and both rinses down the drain. Not into the sump, not into the display, not saved for next time. Everything you just removed is in that water.
Step 6: repeat on a schedule
For a healthy coral from a trusted source with nothing visible in the cup, one dip and observation is reasonable. If you saw anything at all, dip again in 5–7 days, and a third time after that. Most pests lay eggs that dips do not reliably kill, so you are timing the hatch, not landing one knockout blow. Three rounds on a schedule beats one aggressive attempt every time.
Step 7: quarantine if you can
Even a small separate tank or a plastic tub with a heater and a pump, run for two to four weeks, catches everything a dip missed before it reaches your display. If you cannot, place new corals somewhere you will actually look at them daily for a couple of weeks.
Get the exact numbers
The Complete Coral Dipping Guide is an 11-page instant download covering dip times and dosages, coral-by-coral sensitivity notes, what to do when a coral reacts badly, and the schedule for repeat treatments. It is $4.99 and it will save you the price of one frag the first time you use it.
Pair it with the Coral Pest ID & Treatment Guide so you know what fell into the cup, or get everything in the Complete Reef Care Library.