Tricks for growing out zoa frags

[subman]

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.

[asylumdown]

+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.

[Baldy]

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?

[subman]

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)

[duncangweller]

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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[Baldy]

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.

[Baldy]

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.