Lets start a manly discussion about skirts?

rottface4 · Jan 5, 2007

Ok its probably not very manly to talk about skirts, but I'm talking about skirt of the zoanthids here. Not that that is manly either. A friend of mine got in a discussion the other day about what cause the skirts of a zoanthid to be long or short. Now obvisouly it is somewhat species specific, but we were curious about environmental changes that cuase the skirts of a particular type of zoanthid to grow longer or shorter. I always felt it was flow related (high --> longer skirts, low --> shorter skirt) and perhaps food avaliabilty. I was just curious what every here has observed?

ie:
short skirt

compliments of manhattenreef from zoaid.com

vs.

long skirt

from my office tank

JGoslee · Jan 5, 2007

All the zoa's in my tank that have long skirts are getting blasted with flow. I have a few with short skirts and they are in my low flow areas. So I would agree with your statement above.

Sea MunnKey · Jan 5, 2007

Frankly I like the 'Long Skirt' Zoas....it does remind me of the Ancient Chinese painting of the Dragon's FireBall...JMHO.

Azurel · Jan 5, 2007

I think I can honestly say I don't have any zoas with long skirts......Other then the Protopaly type polyps but those always have long skirts from what I have seen.

I personally doubt that it would be a feeding response in a typical zoanthid polyp. As there has been no research as to wither they actively feed or not. I have tried many time and nothing. I think it has to do more with flow then anything else, or possibly lighting. The longer the skirt the more surface area the more light they can absorb.

JGoslee · Jan 5, 2007

You might be on to something Azurel about the surface area. My tank is extremely bright which would also along with the high flow explain the long skirts. The only low flow areas in my tank are also shaded areas.

fishes2889 · Jan 5, 2007

I think it mostly has to do with lighting and flow.

For example i put a frag of some nice pink paly's about a month ago in my 5.5g that had long skirts just as the big colony in my 33g. The 5.5g has 32 watts of PC and the 33g has 3x54 T5's. The 33g beats the 5.5g in water overturn/flow. And of course the 33g beats the 5.5g in PAR and wattage. Since then they have been getting shorter and shorter.

Oh yeah and all my zoa/paly's have long skirts in my 33g...

Steve

rottface4 · Jan 5, 2007

Well I agree with the flow ascpect however, when I had a 175w 10K xm over my twenty long, my zoas would hardly opens, and when the did they were always small, with small skirts. Now my office tank which has high flow and 2x9w actinic and 2x20w 6.5k screw in PC and some of my zoanthids in there have developed long skirts. It would be cool to see if someone with a large colony could mimic different scenarios over different parts of the colony and see if different parts of the colony develop different skirt lengths. I have a small colony that part of it is blocked on the side by other rock so it gets less flow then the more exposed part. It seems that the more exposed areas have longer skirts. But the less exposed area with some what shorter skirts is newer growth so it is hard to say.