Hi Jarred1,
You're welcome. I'm glad you liked it!!
It is important to remember that the study was done with SPS corals, not zoas.
My suggestion to bring the discussion in the Zoa forum was with the intent to pay more attention to artificial coral foods and how they could help us to maintain cnidarians in close systems.
Overfeeding won't help any organism. In our case, as we already know for decades, it would be detrimental to the water quality, so we could skip that part. The polyps of corals would take only what they could fit in their guts.
Feeding the quality artificial coral foods will add nutritious particles to be digested by the organisms. Target feeding is crucial to keep the food where it needs to go without waste/pollution. Balance artificial food particles would help the organisms and the balance of nutrients of the system. Same for fishes.
There is a difference among the SPS in the article, yes. I do believe there is differences between zoanthids for their needs also. I actually believe there is differences between, say different Zoanthus spp. Those differences include basically what the text tried to explain since the beginning with SPS coral. Those are the response to light, water motion and food particles.
Indeed it's not as simple as we wish, is it?
I've been noticing those three important fats for years with zoas, but never found any studies bout it. It actually makes sense and is true.
You missed understood about this part:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jarred1
That was a great read, thank you for posting a link to it.
From what I could understand from the experiment is that over feeding will cause your corals to slow growth. Feeding the artificial food that was tested will only effect certain types of corals and even then the growth isn't that significant.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
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The paper actually states the opposite of your affirmation, and I quote:
" Some artificial foods resulted in
a significant increase in growth in Mc and Pd, but not in Pc. These combined results suggest that Mc may be more heterotrophic than Pc. This study illustrates that each species has unique requirements for optimal growth conditions that can be determined by relatively simple and low cost experiments, but that ideal conditions for one species might not be generalized to others."
The ideal conditions for one species might not be generalized to other zoas too. That would include light and water motion, besides food particles.
It would be great if we had a similar study for zoanthids.
Thanks for your comments!!
Let's wait for others to put their experiences/ observations.
This topic is very interesting!
Grandis.