Morphing zoo's
I have posted before about some zoo's that I had morphing. I thought it was just something that naturally occured when 2 different colonies grew together.
I have been doing a lot of research on this and am going to be setting up a little experiment in the next week.
zoo's will go through big physical morphs reflecting the conditions they are kept. If you keep them too low in the tank withnot enough light, they will extend their stalks "reaching" up to get to the light. if you keep them in too high a flow they tend to "skirt out" extending their lashes so long in fact that the skirts can cover the rest of the zoo.
One of the biggest factors in morphing is lighting. I have seen 2 frags of the same colony change into 2 completly different looking colonies. one colony was kept under 50/50 PC and the other under 14k hamilton DE 250w MH. after 2 months of being in the tank you could not tell that they came off the same colony.
Now granted that these were 2 seperate systems and there was a diff in water chemistry. But the 2 tanks were close enough in chemistry in my opinion for this not to be toooo big a factor in the changes of color patterns.
I am going to try and set up the same type of little experiment. I have a friend that has a 20 gallon tank under 50/50 PC I am going to select a colony out of my grow tanks and give him a colony of them and document the transformations that the zoo's under go.
I am still about a week out from launching this. when I get the colony selected I will take a pic of the "before" and take pics of the colony each week to document if there is any change in the patterns and colors of the zoo's.
I just thought this interesting and wanted to share it with you guys. should be fun to see what happens.
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