Containing growth?

[blasterman789]

Zoas love high nutrients, and your tank has it. They grow fast when there's nitrate in a small tank, and will grow faster when you feed the tank zooplankton, oyster-fest, or similiar. Not much competition in there either.

I have some watermelons that were stubborn in one of my no fish frag tanks and didn't grow a millimeter in 6 months. Moved them to a higher nutrient tank with fish and micro feeding and they're exploding. I put rocks on the edges of the patch and they grow right over it for no effort fragging.

Those purples are worth cash. Trade them in for some montis that you can place up high on the rocks. My .02$

 

[JeF4y]

We always do a good amount of research on whatever we desire to put in the tank BEFORE we get it in, so we've been very cautious around the Zoas regarding gloves, etc.

And as for high nutrients, I think we had a little too much nutrient in the tank. We had more algae than I really wanted in the tank, which I believe was simply due to overfeeding, but with the plankton, we were adding (and still do) PhytoFeast to help keep our pod population up (which we had MILLIONS of them and are now rebuilding). The phyto also caused a TON of featherdusters to pop up. I had to tell people that they were really featherdusters in pics as they had some resemblence to aiptasia. LOL. But anyhow, I will say that phytoplankton additions do seem to have an effect on the tank. Whether good or bad, depends on what you like, but it worked for me.