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First I will talk about the zoas I have that grow the most. On zoaid I would have to say they are the Riddler Zoas, and they have outgrown every other zoa in my tank by far. They also happen to be at the bottom of my tank, but I think what will follow will explain this. I ordered this frag from Blanes a few years ago and I think it had something like 8 heads, but has grown and covered an entire rock with over hundreds.
First, I think having a good surface to grow upon was key
Second, the flow from a powerhead “pushed” the zoa to go in the direction of the flow.
Third, the tank has no skimmer, so the water was “dirty”
Fourth, I never messed around with those zoas, I let them do their thing
Now on to other things I think people should think about.
- One would be something I learned about grass. Did you know that grass only grows at night? During the day all of it’s energy is used to soak up the suns rays, then at night it focuses on growing. This is something I learned from the caretaker of a golf course, and a very nice one at that. Do you think that it is possible that a longer night period could allow Zoas more time to grow, just like grass?
- Throughout this entire thread it seems that we think that fraging the mother colonies is the fastest way to get more zoas. So to me that means cutting some zoas out and putting them on a new area to grow. How about this then? Cutting the runners tissue, but leaving everything in place. If you see the mat/tissue spreading to another area, just cut it there and maybe some heads will pop out of that. I know that I have a few runners that are about an inch long of the colonies tissue, and I could easily just cut one of those. In fact I will be doing this now, but has anyone tried to do this to see if you get more heads?
- Has anyone tried different surface types? I have notices that there are areas on my reef that zoas will not grow. These are almost always porous areas in the rock. For whatever reason the zoas hate these areas and grow around it if they can, but most stop in their tracks and don’t expand anywhere else. So maybe there is an surface area that they love to grow on.
- Dirty water I think is something zoas like as well, skimmerless tanks make for happy zoas.
- Time of year, is there a best time of year?\
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