Can I build a coral fence?

Hope the intriguing title ropes in some more readers. My question is can a more aggresive coral such as a hammer or bubble or even a favia brain be used to keep a fast spreading softie in check with their "sweeper" tentacles? Specifically, I have some new coral arriving tomorrow (pictures I promise) all of the above included and I also have these mushroom like corals (the guy at the lfs said they came from the marshall islands but didn't know much more) and they spread rather rapidly. They are however fairly attractive so if I could keep them contained so to speak with these I would like to. Whats more likely the softies overcoming the lps or the lps restriciting their spreading?

 

I used hydnophora sp. to do this. It kept the softies at bay.

 

should work u can try frog spawn aswell... but any stinging coral should keep them at bay usually

 

a lot of leathers(finger and spaghetti) will keep anything at bay, so will hammers and galaxy corals and the sort.

 

Will they keep pulsating Xenia at bay, those things spread like the plague

 

I think it depends what you're trying to keep at bay. If you're talking about an encrusting/branching coral then an aggressive coral like torch/frogspawn/hydnophora/acan echinata etc should help keep it at bay although I've heard some bad things about some types of coral in some tanks that just won't be held back no matter what.
However with some mushrooms you can run into the mushroom's non-encrusting reproductive process where a mushroom can detach from the rock and go floating around and start a new colony elsewhere in the tank and thus stinging everything else in the vicinity of it's new home. In that case there's not much you can do to prevent that. It's a risk. It also depends on the type of mushroom, some types tend to do this more than others. The most problematic is the relatively common discosoma genus mushroom, I think, not ricordia etc.

So ultimately it depends exactly what you're trying to protect against I think.