Zoas not opening up all the way / some shrunken

[Kremis]

Hey guys, over the past few weeks my zoas have been being kinda finicky. You can see in the vid some that usually have big polyps like jubilee and utter chaos are shrunken along with others and some are just flat out closed.

Tank info: its a 60 gallon frag tank with no filtration. FIsh are a yellow tang and a clown, I feed once a day. I am going to buy some hanna checkers for nitrate and phos as I feel like this might be the problem. Before, there was almost no nutrients and I was struggling to see any algae growth even, after feeding heavily now all the discs are covered in algae. Maybe I rose the nutrients too fast?

Lighting is AI primes, but I havent touched these since setup 2 months ago so im not sure these are the issue. Flow is moderate, not a lot of surface flow because I like being able to look but there is flow underneath.


Tank is still young and im trying to figure out a maintenance schedule for it that works. Any experienced zoa keepers want to share their nutrient levels? I feel like this is the issue as here is a before picture and you can see the zoas are a lot happier and the growout tiles are way less green.

 

[vetteguy53081]

Tune the lights to More blue and moderate water flow. Do feed with reef roids, reef frenzy or similar and add iodine to water occasionally.
Randomly check a couple of plugs especially underneath for black bugs or eggs from nudibranch.
Give them light gentle bursts from a turkey baster as they seem to respond to the gentle blasts. If they do, consider increasing water flow some more

 

[danieyella]

Mine do best with my nitrates in the 5-10 range and phos around .1, if I drop below .1 they start to get ***** and close up. The majority of mine also seem happiest with enough flow to lightly move their skirts - i keep it pulsing so it's not 100% of the time. I don't have a super fancy powerhead. I also can say I noticed an improvement when I upped my blues and dropped my whites a little (when whites are on it still looks white in the tank).

 

[TerminatorPhillium]

Tune the lights to More blue and moderate water flow. Do feed with reef roids, reef frenzy or similar and add iodine to water occasionally.
Randomly check a couple of plugs especially underneath for black bugs or eggs from nudibranch.
Give them light gentle bursts from a turkey baster as they seem to respond to the gentle blasts. If they do, consider increasing water flow some more