Tricks for growing out zoa frags
 

Hi All.

Wondering if anyone has any tips for growing out zoa frags. seems like more than half of the frags i buy end up melting. in the last couple weeks, ive bought 5 different frags of zoas. out of them, 2 are holding ok, 2 are melting slowly but steadily, and 1 melted away pretty quick. on top of that, ive got 3 other frags that i put in a long time ago that melted until they were almost gone, and are now holding. not really growing any bigger, just holding at like 3-5 heads. one of them is showing some promise, it had 2 heads for months and now just started sprouting 2 more. the one frag of dragon eyes i bought with around 30 heads half melted when i put it in, then took off. ive got 2 larger colonies from it now, but thats the only one thats taken off.

anything i can do to stop this meltdown when first introduced? theres no spiders or zoa pox that i can see, ive been keeping an eye out for those pretty closely.

Hey curious how youre aclimating them to your system? What is your system does the Temp swing? I assume all your water is tested and right where it needs to be?

Zoas will melt at any point, its weird. What I do with zoa frags no matter where or who they come from is give them a dip in ReVive Coral Cleaner. Acclimate the frags to your water properly. Then once they are in the tank make sure the flow is not to high on them & dont touch them or move them, the more you move them the less they like to grow.

water params are good. 0 nitrates, 0.03 phos, 430 clac, 8 alk, 1300 mg, 1.025sg, 79C temp. no swings in temp, pH makes a daily trip from 7.8-7.9 in the morning to 8.0 in the pm. i have chaeto in the sump on a reverse light cycle so im not sure how else to stop that from happening.

i drip acclimate for about an hour. ive just recently started using revive as well, and the 1 zoa frag ive used that on is holding ok.

Same as above with acclamation. Lighting?

look into your lights i bet thats your issue, acclimate all you like for water conditions but if they dont acclimate to the lights they melt in no time , since your other pieces melted slightly then kept a few polyps i can guarantee its the lights .

another one is steady alk......its another big cause of melting zoos.

last but not least is fungus or bacteria.....these youll need to dip for.

i have a diy led setup thats dimmable down to 20%. full bore the corals dont seem to like it very much so i run it at 80%. i usually drop it to half of what im running when i first introduce and then bring it back up over a week. do you think this is too quick?

We don't acclimate our frags when they arrive. This is due to lower temps due to them being shipped overnight. But we do use revive as a dip for them just to help the along.

Also a feeding 30 minutes after adding them doesn't hurt either

You have to remember they like slightly dirtier water.

what do you feed your zoas at the store? ive mostly used a homemade blender mush but recently started trying coral frenzy as well.

as far as dirtier water, my chaeto sucks up everything really quick =)

Live phyto and rotifers, if you look at any coral food you will see the first ingredient to be phyto.

Live phyto works wonders I find, stays in the wAter column for a little time too .

I don't acclimate at all either and have had very few zoas melt. There are two different issues here one is growth the other is life. I'm with Denny about the lights, one of the biggest causes of melting in my opinion is change in light.
What lights are the frags under where you are buying them? I used to assume zoas and palys liked lower light but in fact most have done better in very intense lighting.
The other question is growth. Food will increase growth dramatically, but I find they just need time to settle in then the exponential growth with start.

+1 on the not acclimating. maybe it's bad practice but I haven't acclimated a single coral on this tank, zoa or otherwise, so long as the salinity in the source water and the salinity in my tank are within 0.002 of each other. I just plop them in (to a quarantine tank though, but the principle is the same).

I've only got two zoa frags so far, but neither melted, and neither has several Gs in SPS.

so other than matching light as close as possible (which is difficult unless i use a par meter due to leds looking so different compared to MH which look very different from T5), what do you recommend for light acclimation time? 1 week, 2, 3?

What have you been doing for light acclamation?

I personally don't change anything but I do watch and move them to different areas if they don't respond within a day. I think making changes to the system every time I get a new frag is a mistake, as it is more important to have consistency than anything else.

(its not about the type of fixture but more so the proximity and intensity that will help in acclimating)

I'm not entirely sure what I do to mine but they grow like wildfire.

I use reef chilli from BRS and squirt that in a couple of times a week.

When I get frags I acclimate them over and hour or so and they drop them on my sand bed. After a week or so, assuming they have all opened up and look happy I move them up in the tank to where I want them.

Mine seem to do best low in the tank, the only ones that I have up high don't look that happy.

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for light acclimation i usually dim my light down to half of whatever i have it set at. then over the course of 5-7 days i increase it a little bit each day back to where i had it.

I've been thinking about the light acclimation thing all morning, and come to think of it there's only 1 zoa frag in my tank that I can definitively remember light acclimating. And its the one that hasn't melted as far as I can tell. I hadn't thought that light acclimation would do that but I think we've figured the problem out.