Zoas and Palys

TinyFish · May 29, 2023

Has anyone ever had any experience with palytoxin from a Zoa or Paly? I’ve heard and read about it and it seems to be pretty nasty but i’m not sure what the actual risk is.

Cichlid Dad · May 29, 2023

Don't work on them outside of water with without gloves, eye protection and a respirator if you are concerned. Never boil rock, cook rock in the oven. Never pressure wash rock. All of these activities can cause the poison to get air born. That being said, from what I understand, not all zoa's and paly have the toxicity but don't take my word for it. I have a tank full of paly and zoa's and never had an issue.

TinyFish · May 30, 2023

Cichlid Dad said:
Don't work on them outside of water with without gloves, eye protection and a respirator if you are concerned. Never boil rock, cook rock in the oven. Never pressure wash rock. All of these activities can cause the poison to get air born. That being said, from what I understand, not all zoa's and paly have the toxicity but don't take my word for it. I have a tank full of paly and zoa's and never had an issue.

Good thing i won’t be cooking rock then!

But in all seriousness, i’m not worried i just wanted to know if anyone had actually had any experiences with it. I feel gloves when working outside a tank is generally a good practice anyways.

3sxp · Jun 1, 2023

TinyFish said:
Good thing i won’t be cooking rock then!

But in all seriousness, i’m not worried i just wanted to know if anyone had actually had any experiences with it. I feel gloves when working outside a tank is generally a good practice anyways.

Hi. I had very similar questions. My sheet is super incomplete, but I'm compiling community answers to this here if it helps:

One of the best forum discussions I've seen on this is here:

https://www.nano-reef.com/forums/to...rals-rumors-legends-or-is-this-a-real-danger/

And this was a really good podcast/youtube discussion:

I've gotten some "off the record" reports as well that corroborate what's in the nano-reef thread -- mainly that there is a pretty specific list of palys that have been known to cause problems. I specifically was interested in "utter chaos" zoa (which is a paly) which multiple folk have confirmed is a "non toxic" paly. They all produce SOME, but palytoxin *poisoning* seems to be a pretty specific event limited to a smaller number of paly species, mainly those related to palythoa toxica, palythoa grandis, and a few others. Common names are at the bottom of the "palytoxin sources" tab in that sheet.

Hope this helps! I'm new to reefing, but making this a personal crusade.

I have young kids so wanted to really be sure I wasn't risking a poisoning event with something in my tank. It can be pretty confusing because there's so little consistency with species identification and it's so hard to test for a toxic level of palytoxin.