What corals do you keep with your zoos?

[MikeandNicole]

Time for a little discussion.

A good friend of mine is also an incredible zoa keeper. He is my kung fu master of zoas and has always been able to heal sick zoas when I have failed. He has been doing it for a long time and his system was exploding with zoas. He basically has like a 45g display that is plumbed into an acrylic trough frag system behind it for a total volume of maybe 120g. He kept it loaded with zoas and softies and they exploded in his tank faster than he could frag them out and sell them (no single polyp frags either).

So here is where the tale gets interesting. As his home fragging business took off he starting bringing in LPS and SPS for the first time. He was dosing to keep the calc and alk in check and his LPS and SPS were exploding in growth. The problem came when his zoas essentially stopped growing and he actually started losing zoas for the first time. This went on for a while until he had an alk overdose that nuked all of his SPS and LPS (hundreds of frags).

This brings us to now, I was talking to him the other day and he has decided not to stock SPS and is only doing zoas softies, and some limited LPS. He also decided to stop dosing and essentially does a 5g water change a day (as he is bagging frags up). His zoas have exploded in growth again and are looking like they used to.

His theory: You cannot keep zoas with SPS long term. Second: Don't dose anything and just do small consistent water changes to keep your water levels in check.

Thought?

 

[fshaqrmman]

In my opinion what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for everyone in this hobby.

I have a mix of SPS (only 4-5 small-medium pieces), LPS, softies, and zoas in my tank. I dose Magnessium, Calcium A+B, and Lugols Solution and don't perform regular water changes. It works for me...but I wouldn't recommend it for others.

 

[Nanook]

I could be wrong, but IME, zoanthids do well with slightly higher levels of nitrate and phosphate compared to SPS. I tend to feed my softy tanks more food and I notice the polyps taking in flake food, small bits of pellets and other stuff from Rod's Reef food.

 

[ms123]

I agree with the above statement, may work for one but not another. I have been running a mixed tank for a few years now. Large growing colonies of zoas, sps, lps, rics. I only dose ca and alk to keep numbers in line.

 

[MikeandNicole]

Thank you for the responses guys. I want this more to be a discussion than a definitive answer. I have always kept zoas in mixed company with SPS and LPS. I have had some great success and I have had some failures. Same can be said to dosing as well.

 

[tlsrcs]

I keep i mixed tank i have about 4-5 different sps and about 17-20 different P's and Z's. Just like 2 LPS but i dose nothing just reg. water changes my skimmer has been offline for about 3weeks and i have actually noticed more sps growth. i feed once every 2-3days. my zoas are healthy maybe not growing as well as they could but still growing and not dieing so that is a win in my books

 

[dlaws]

So, just to clarify, your friend's reasoning is that you need to dose when you have sps but the zoa's don't like it? It seems like really frequent water changes would have the same effect as dosing to keep levels in check.

 

[feh]

I have several different types of LPS with my zoos. Scoly, acans, frogspawn, platy, chalice, favia, micros. Plan to add some SPS once the tank matures a little more.