Teeny Tiny Zoa disc heads - causes? recovery?

[ZoWhat]

I have a 6ft 180g dominated by palys and then zoas

Palys I'm not having issues with.

Several species of zoas have reduced themselves to teeny tiny disc heads AFTER I discovered my nitrates were way out of hand in the 40 to 50 range.

Over the last 3-4 weeks I've resolved the issue with no3, getting them down and stabilizing at 10-15ppm.

The zoas suffering from tiny disc heads are slooooooowly recovering, showing signs of being more opened up YET they still remain tiny.

1) If I have lighting (~150PAR), flow (light, gentle) and now no3/po4 (10ppm/less than . 5ppm) worked out... any other things I'm not thinking about causing certain zoas to shrink?

2) How long does it take for tininess take to fully recover? Will they ever get normal size again?

3) Other than stabilizing no3 at 10ppm and po4 at around .2 to .5 is there anything else I can do to help with getting these zoas back to larger disc heads?

 

[vetteguy53081]

Likely stress. Pics under white light would be helpful
Some factors can be:
High nitrate
High phosphate
Insufficient flow
Lights too bright
Black bugs
High salinity
Low ph

 

[Zoa_Fanatic]

I have a 6ft 180g dominated by palys and then zoas

Palys I'm not having issues with.

Several species of zoas have reduced themselves to teeny tiny disc heads AFTER I discovered my nitrates were way out of hand in the 40 to 50 range.

Over the last 3-4 weeks I've resolved the issue with no3, getting them down and stabilizing at 10-15ppm.

The zoas suffering from tiny disc heads are slooooooowly recovering, showing signs of being more opened up YET they still remain tiny.

1) If I have lighting (~150PAR), flow (light, gentle) and now no3/po4 (10ppm/less than . 5ppm) worked out... any other things I'm not thinking about causing certain zoas to shrink?

2) How long does it take for tininess take to fully recover? Will they ever get normal size again?

3) Other than stabilizing no3 at 10ppm and po4 at around .2 to .5 is there anything else I can do to help with getting these zoas back to larger disc heads?

Light makes a bigger factor for head size in my Zoa then parameters do. The lower mine are in the tank or the shadier the area the bigger the heads. Super high par lights give me zoa with very small heads. Except armor of gods. I could glue them to my biocube hood and they’d still be huge. They can’t get enough light

 

[ZoWhat]

Likely stress. Pics under white light would be helpful
Some factors can be:
High nitrate
High phosphate
Insufficient flow
Lights too bright
Black bugs
High salinity
Low ph

Here's my checklist per Vets list:

High nitrate - use to be 40 or higher but now for 4 weeks managed at 10ppm using vodka dosing

High phosphate - always around 0.5 but never ultra low in the 0.0x range

Insufficient flow - tricky one because flow means 10 different things to 10 different people. My flow is definitely "diverted" with a gentle flow of just a whisper of flow flowing over most zoas

Lights too bright - borrowed a PAR meter. I have a white phase during the late morning at around 150 par. Then a deep blue phase running all evening in the 80-100 range

Black bugs - I have no knowledge of this and don't know how to check for them. Red light at 2am? I wouldn't even know what to do if I found them bc a 6ft tank has about 50 spots where zoas are mounted to large, heavy LR. A massive nearly impossible undertaking

High salinity - kept pretty stable at 1.026

Low ph - no issues here. My pH bottoms out at 8.1 and peaks at 8.3

 

[vetteguy53081]

Drop salinity to 1.025 and phosphate to<.03
Add iodide not iodine to the water
Dipping in peroxide may perk them up

 

[ZoWhat]

Drop salinity to 1.025 and phosphate to<.03
Add iodide not iodine to the water
Dipping in peroxide may perk them up

I use SeaChem to test Phosphate.

It's really HARD to differentiate the lower ranges bc the test media slowly changes color over 2mins.

First 10 secs it's straight yellow. Next 30secs it's slightly yellow/green having me think its around 0.5 .... then over 3mins the green starts to get darker.

Its sooooo freaking subjective without giving definitive numbers.

Thoughts?

 

[Hooz]

I run nitrates in the 7-10ppm range, phosphates around 0.05, salinity at 1.024, temp at 78⁰.

Most of my zoas peak PAR is 70-75 with whites, and drops to the high 60's in the blue only periods.

I use All for Reef, dose Red Sea AB+ daily and feed Reef Chili 3-4x a week.

 

[Hooz]

I'll add that I use All for Reef because it has trace elements in it, and I use AB+ for the aminos. I think those 2 things are critical for zoa health.