Different Zoes cant touch?
 

I got some Miami Vice Zoa's and after getting them to transfer and start growing on one section of my rock, I wanted to add some different color into a cluster of existing orange Zoa's. Well now my Miami Vice frag is all shriveled up. Was only in contact for a day. Been 2 days now and there still lookin sic and shriveled. Not opening. Did I kill them?

From reading zoa's won't go after each other. Perhaps it was shocked by the move?

A true zoa master should chime in! 11purewater

LOL I'm hardly a master but thank you:wink:.but you should give your new zoas there own space until they acclimate properly,preferably at the bottom of your tank.

Unfortunately zoanthids are like that. Once they settle somewhere and are disturbed, there is a risk that they will get shocked and shrivel and melt away.

You just look at some specie of zoanthids and they melt. Dosing vitamine C help sometime so it might be a good idea to dose a bit of vitamine C (sodium ascorbate available at iherbs.com) in the tank before planning a move or a frag.

Ohh I never knew that. Hmmm. Well, I will get some Vit C. Regular human pills not the same?

No...not the same although that's not to say people haven't tried.

I have several of the vice Zoas & I find them to be very fickle when it comes to other zoa & paly's, give them space & I dip in some RX or revive. I tried the Vit C dosing in my nano & it was not very succesful but recently I have decovered that a little dose of iodine daily is very helpful as well as weekly feeding.

Zoas are all different. Some more aggressive than others. If you mix colonies it's always possible one will outcompete for space.

Palys are the devil when it comes to that !

Anyone tried the pink and gold palys? those are absolutely undestructible and have invadors to anything in the tank. They are climbing on my SPS, clams, anything. If all were so tough as these, we would never see any of them shrivel and melt. Why is it that those are so darn resistant but you look at some other and they melt?

Very anoying.

I have a few different vice zoas and they're all in zoa gardens touching a few other zoas with zero issues for me so far.

For the reccord. Whats the difference between a Zoa and a Paly? My orange ones I think are Zoas, but they grow like crazy and are takinmg over large realestate

Paly's are generally much larger heads ( dime to nickle size ) then Zoas & they tend to have longer thicker stems.

^ If only it were this easy, truthfully even the most seasoned keepers can't definitively identify which is which. Ribosomal RNA sequencing is the only REAL way to differentiate the two.

Although Greg's generalizations are generally true many Zoanthus Gigantus (all of the "people eaters") under that description would be considered palys.

Captain America, Purple death, Nuclear greens, "button polyps" among a few others fall under the Paly realm. It depends on which taxonomic classification your using though, they ALL belong to the order Zoantharia so they are technically all "zoas". I would estimate 80% of the time people use the term paly it's used incorrectly, although a certain vendor here is absolutely brutal for it only adding to the problem.

Ya I was just being very general cause I was waiting for your scientific input :razz: