smelly, rotten zoa.. what to do?

[markietan]

i recently bought a piece of zoo from someone.. got two pieces in fact... went home right after meeting and put the zoas into my main display tank

the first frag is doing very well, all polyps open the next day but the second frag which had alot more polyps had almost 1/2 closed. i left it there for awhile hoping it will acclamatize and a few days later it was still like that...

so i decided to take the frag out and put it in my frag tank.. and when i took it out, man did that piece of zoa stink. like rotting flesh... and some polyps / flesh actually dropped off.... so i tot i had better give it an iodine bath... mixed some iodine with tank water and dipped for awhile... after putting into the frag tank for awhile, i had second thoughts and decided to frag out some the polyps that were still open

fragged it into 4 pieces... placed it at different corners of my frag tank

today i checked, 3 of the 4 pieces had no polyps open. i took them out and one of them was totally rotten. threw it away.. the other two, also stink a little but looked like the polyps were still pretty intact. last one frag had a few polyps half open...

it also seem like the other zoas in the frag tank that were in close proximity to these 3 frags, were affected by too because some polyps that were usually open big were closed up.

so now i've removedd the other two pieces and placed it in another container... question is what do i do with the last frag that have some polyps open and some that looks like its falling off? i haven't taken it out to smell it yet because anymore rotten smell will probably make me puke. should i just throw away the other two pieces that i've separated from the main tank? will my other zoas be affected?

how how how??? i have other expensive zoas in the frag tank and i dun want them to be affected... i think my colony of pink paly in my main display tank also took a hit because > 1/2 of the polyps are not open today..... lets see how they do tmr... fingers crossed

[dragonfly_sg]

Same thing happen to me too. I Fragged (peel and cut the mat off the original rock) the rotting colony into 4 frags of 4 to 5 of the viable polyps each and dump them into a quarantine tank with some decent flow over them. 2 frag survived and one still a hit and missed after 2 months, the last totally rotted off the small frag rock. The main rotting colony was dumped.

I wouldn't suggest you keep the new frags in the main tank just in case the rotting zoa spread some fungus or disease to you main population. That would sure suck big time..... not worth the risk.

PS. I suggest you do alittle water change if thing don't look up.

[markietan]

Same thing happen to me too. I Fragged (peel and cut the mat off the original rock) the rotting colony into 4 frags of 4 to 5 of the viable polyps each and dump them into a quarantine tank with some decent flow over them. 2 frag survived and one still a hit and missed after 2 months, the last totally rotted off the small frag rock. The main rotting colony was dumped.

I wouldn't suggest you keep the new frags in the main tank just in case the rotting zoa spread some fungus or disease to you main population. That would sure suck big time..... not worth the risk.

PS. I suggest you do alittle water change if thing don't look up.

is it important to have some flow ?

[dragonfly_sg]

is it important to have some flow ?

yes. I found that with some flow the rotting flesh gets blown away removing the polluted stale water and the flesh water get to circulate around the polyps, this helps the stolon heals faster. If there is no flow, the rotting flesh hangs around and the rot continue to spread through the whole colony if allow to.

In one worst case when I had rotting and fungus (white web-like patches) happening, I hose the colony under a fast running tap to get rid of all the dead polyps and rotting stolon and even taking a blade to scrape of the 50/50 cases. Then put the rescued colony under a good flow. I continue to do the same thing the next day if I see anymore dead or half dead polyps and finally manage to save a few polyps.