Whats coming out of its mouth!?!

[Anthonius]

So I dont have this on video and even if i did you wouldnt be able to see it without a macro lens. I thought it may possibly be the budding. Anyways I was up at my tank looking at a zoa frag thats right up next to the glass and notices some little black dots in the mouth of a could zoas that actually turned out to me the same color as some of the zoa's "skirt". Is the zoa budding? or is it sick? Not all of them were doing it just a couple of the really healthy looking ones. They are huge compared to the neighboring polyps on the same frag. Is the little thing coming out of the mouth and floating away in the flow a Zoanthid seed? Im new so cut me some slack on the Zoanthids

 

[kichimark]

zoas are known to expel some excess zooxanthallae in this fashion.

 

[Anthonius]

it almost looks like they were spitting out their tentacles. it was a dark color almost black but i observed it on a tubbs blue zoa so the tentacles are a dark hue of reddish brown but a few of them were doing it and i thought that was a cool thing to see. how exactly do they reproduce? do they just sprout new heads from the mat they create?

 

[The Escaped Ape]

Like Kichimark said, it's likely to be the expulsion of excess zooxanthellae. I've sometimes seen it when they do this and it almost looks like a little package ejected, which could explain why it looked like it was ejected a tentacle.

Zoas reproduce by budding off the main mat, as you suspected. You'd usually see a very small bud at the base of a fully grown polyp that then progressively grows larger. The process repeats itself until the zoas cover the rock they're on.

 

[Anthonius]

Thanks for all the help guys

 

[kichimark]

Zoas reproduce by budding off the main mat, as you suspected. You'd usually see a very small bud at the base of a fully grown polyp that then progressively grows larger. The process repeats itself until the zoas cover the rock they're on.

+1.

I have a huge colony of tubbs (about 350 polyps) and every once in a while I see one expelling some zooxanthallae. In the very beginning I was worried but my tubbs always bounce back.