Isolating specific zoa attributes

[allan]

Not really truly scientific, but taking a page out of Mr Cob's book, Milly and I are trying to isolate a particular color.

The first picture shows the small colony of a zoa that we picked up from AD early last year. The quality is poor but you may be able to see a slight variance in coloration within the colony. The color rides the spectrum from pink to not pink. What I like about this coral is that it's very fleshy and large compared to most. But the circle of pink in the plate is what I'm after.

So Milly fragged out about three or four of these guys, attempting to pull just the pink ones. We've got a couple of frags healing up rather nicely. Once they start to grow, I plan on pulling the pinkest of the new zoas and running another iteration. As it is now, they grow different shades with no regard to what I want. My guess is that if I continue to cull the zoas that are pink, and grow them out, that I can isolate the specific gene to give me colonies of the pink zoas.

My reference to MCC above is third hand, but I had heard that he took some of the tri color war coral and isolated the pale blue portion in an attempt to get a solid light blue colony. That hasn't been validated yet.








Just thought of this, if you compare that zoa to the square next to it, discount the fact that it's just a little closer to the camera than the tile is, and the tile is 1" by 1"... you can get a pretty good idea of how big these things are. They're not massive, but they certainly don't get lost in your tank.