Zoa Growth

My tank is relatively new... 4 months. My water parameters look good. I have an assortment of zoa's, paly's, frogspawn, Acan, ricordea, etc.

The question now is growth. Keep the water parameters stable and good light... obvious...

What growth rate should I expect? How long to see new polyps? Weeks? Months? I'd like these to grow significantly.

Mark

 

with my experience with zoas, for about 2 months i had no growth what so ever then all of a sudden they are starting to spread like crazy, i get multiple new heads every day and they are finally starting to leave my frag rock and grow on my main rock. so i say just give them some time and once they start growing they will quickly spread

 

Cool.

M

 

It all depends on the individual coral. Some Zoas grow like crazy, other don't grow quickly at all. If you want your lps to grow quicker, spot feed them some sort of mysis or raw sea food.

 

Zoanthids = soft corals, not lps From everything that I've read, there is no solid proof that feeding them speeds up growth so no need to pollute your water by adding extra food. I've also read that not all zoanthids react to solid foods so I don't see any advantage in giving them any.

 

rule of thumb, the more expensive the zoa, the slower they grow. your armor of Gods, Purple Deaths, Nuclear Greens are all very expensive because it takes longer to frag and reproduce.

also, zoas and palys typically like "dirtier" tanks. when my zoas are growing fast, my sps slow down and vice versa. softies like lots of nutients in the water, once i hooked up my GFO reactor and cut back my feedings, my zoas slowed way down

 

Iodine also has a big part in growth.so as i checked and saw it was low,within 2weeks of dosing i noticed ALL softies doing much better

 

In my experience it's completely random. Some will grow in spurts, some will grow fast all the time, some will grow slow all the time. I have no idea what causes any of it to change/happen.
It does seem to almost always take at least a few weeks in a new system before they start doing anything but I did get one small colony of Tubs blues that started growing almost immediately.

It's a complex system and AFAIK they haven't been studied extremely thoroughly, and it's next to impossible to determine species so it's hard to nail anything down.

I agree with patience...they should grow, if the tank is healthy...maybe...