No but it did happen once all one would have to do is frag that strain and keep it going. The thought of every zoanthid or poly with the same color pattern or human givin name has the exact same dna make up to a T is a bit crazy. I would think it's a lot like no two fingerprints or ppl are the same. It would seem zoa's even being the same "name" and color pattern would have a little diffrent make up even if slightly. If not how would animals ect ..evolve?
We don't know that it in fact did happen even once in this instance. That's an
assumption that you might make, but I don't. It was not observed to have happened. The Bowsers were a wild collected colony and and were always observed to have existed as a different "morph" from CAOs. We can't even assume that just because they have a similar color pattern that they shared an immediate cladistic relationship. The Bowser could have been the result of two variants, possibly neither being a CAO, that reproduced sexually and created a new, unique combination. Just because they share a similar morphology does not mean we can assume that it was a genetic mutation of one that resulted in the other. Since you take people as an example, we possess genetic diversity/variability within our species, just like pretty much any other, and this can be expressed differently, but each of those variants possesses only a part of the genetic potential of the population as a whole. How those different alleles interact with each other can vary, and it doesn't even need to involve the creation of new DNA, just the recombination of already existing material. Humans no longer possess the entire body of genetic material within any one person. They have now been separated into different lines which now possess less genetic diversity within each population, but we can of course recombine or further seperate those traits through our method of reproduction. Take wolves as another example. All of the captive varieties are the result of a single genetic source with a huge body of genetic variability that was selectively bred for various traits. No new mutations or genes were needed; it was already there, but expressed as a wild dog/mutt/wolf. These smaller bodies of DNA, all still parts of the same species, can be recombined and something akin to the original can be obtained, though it's entirely possible that some of the genes have been lost in certain lines that were lost/not selected for. Nothing new there, just rehashing of old stuff.
This whole issue is very complex, with a lot of tangents too and imperfect parallels, so it's hard to hit from every angle. I'm not suggesting that every zoanthid has the same genetic makeup to a T, but I would suggest that those differences don't necessarily exist because of a mutation but also likely from simple genetic variability and that those differences aren't always significant and often wouldn't result in the expression of a different type, and further that we wouldn't need to assume that to get a new type it would require the creation of new DNA, but could simply be the recombination or separation of already existing alleles within that gene pool.
Man, I'm not even sure if that came out right anymore. Running on 3 hours of sleep is killing my brain...
edit:
I had also forgotten to mention, with regard to finger prints, that this example also doesn't really work in this instance. The fact that everyone's fingerprints are different doesn't have anything to do with mutation, but is rather a matter of variable expression of that DNA trait. And it's such a tiny trait that if you were looking at two people's DNA and everything else were the same, one might actually think the two specimens were the exact same, almost to a T. I don't think we've even identified which string of DNA influences the development of fingerprints, let alone know how its development is affected. This is much like snowflakes, in which no two are alike across every single snowfall and even within each snow system, yet they are all made up of water. Somehow, even though they all possess the same primary component which doesn't change, they all end up as differing snowflakes. The difference in how each develops may vary because of environmental impurities that are incorporated, but they're still crystalized water.
