What’s going on with these zoas?

[mjw011689]

Something weird started happening to my zoas… I’ve had most of them in there for a good while and they we’re all fine for the most part, and just recently they all started closing up and barely open. Now today one of them started having this stringy stuff come off of them. I’ve never seen zoas do this before. Never had a problem with zoas in the last 20 years for that matter.

I should note, I dipped all the corals that went into this tank, and I did find a nudi on one of the zoas (died during dip). There are also some small brownish flatworms, not the big red planeria type, but there’s very few in there, and it doesn’t appear they’re on the zoas either. There is also a small frogspawn and another lps that I can’t remember the name, and some clove polyps, all opening perfectly fine. Hopefully the photo is clear enough, I had to turn the blue off to get my camera to pic it up.

 

[mjw011689]

First photo shows it the best. There’s like balled up something on the end of each little string

 

[vetteguy53081]

Something weird started happening to my zoas… I’ve had most of them in there for a good while and they we’re all fine for the most part, and just recently they all started closing up and barely open. Now today one of them started having this stringy stuff come off of them. I’ve never seen zoas do this before. Never had a problem with zoas in the last 20 years for that matter.

I should note, I dipped all the corals that went into this tank, and I did find a nudi on one of the zoas (died during dip). There are also some small brownish flatworms, not the big red planeria type, but there’s very few in there, and it doesn’t appear they’re on the zoas either. There is also a small frogspawn and another lps that I can’t remember the name, and some clove polyps, all opening perfectly fine. Hopefully the photo is clear enough, I had to turn the blue off to get my camera to pic it up.

View attachment 3089913 View attachment 3089914

There may be insufficient light intensity as they seem to be stretching and the stringy stuff may be loss of zooxanthellae which is their energy source obtained from lighting and gives them their color and energy. There is also an abundance of spirobid worms in their area. There is sediment on rocks also suggesting inadequate flow for them. They get miserable when there is sediment dust on them.
Take a turkey baster and give them gentle blasts and you will see dust like particles fly off

 

[mjw011689]

I’m on the fence about the lighting. To me it should be enough, but like you said they’re definitely reaching. They didn’t used to do that though, they used to be pretty normal for a few months. It’s a fluval Evo 5, with kessil a80 tuna blue. The rest of the stuff seems normal with the light though.

my understanding is the spirorbid worms are harmless. Is that incorrect? As for the flow, it’s definitely not too low, I’ve got a little wave maker in there that provides zero dead spaces in there. Which ties to the sediment… there’s really none in there on the rocks. Bad photo maybe but I just took a turkey baster and tried to blast it off and there’s nothin there. I can crank the flow up a bit, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be overkill.