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zoa rant.


formerly icyuodd/icyoud2

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i dont really see how purple people eaters really describes the color

 

It does in the same way that, to a geologist, "jimthompsonite" describes a mineral or "Franz Hals" describes a flower pattern to a gardener - the name gives certain connotations based on its popular use among those within that community.

 

Jimthompsonite - named after Jim Thompson. Doesn't tell you that it's in the amphibole group, with a hardness of 2.5, has orthorhombic symmetry, and generally is an ugly shade of grey.

 

Franz Hals - name of a daylily with yellow-orange, slightly frilled lower petals and red, unfrilled upper petals.

 

Purple people eater - name of a zoanthid with green mouth and skirt and a purple oral disc.

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formerly icyuodd/icyoud2

do a google search for purple people eaters.

 

there's red ones, green ones,pink ones, you name it somebody's stuck purple people eater after the color. none of them look the same, and 99% aren't true purple people eaters.

 

now how in the heck does that make it easier? seems every forum has a different name for the same zoa's.

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formerly icyuodd/icyoud2
Could everyone who paid $10+ a polyp for some zoas just because it had a sweet killer name and not because they liked the way it looked (and not to resell higher...)??

... Anyone?

... Anyone? :rolleyes:

Didn't think so :lol:

 

i'd be embarased to raise my hand if i paid $10 a polyp (or $350 for 6)

 

obviously none of us purchase corals we think are ugly, but i bet yopu a pound to a penny, if they didnt have a cool name and where just sold as zoa's, they would have been alot cheaper. :)

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I like the names.... I get stupid looks from my friends when I tell them to look at the cool Zoanthus sp. It works better if they have a catchy name.

 

The price isnt driven by names... it is driven by people who pay the high prices. If I like it I buy it. Never spent more than $25 on any coral in my tank. So I am not driving up the prices by any means.

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Many of these people buy coral because it may well look cool, but mostly because of the name. And more often than not, because they may not even like it much at all but want to frag it up and sell it. Really, it's not hard to find zoanthids you like if you're into them anyway; any morph that isn't brown is pretty cool. It's just that people will buy them just to frag them up, OR just to have the "Jesus's tears nuclear-fallout dragon baby tumors"; like Gucci shoes, for the NAME, not just the cool-ness of said piece. I see it all the g.d. time, and THAT's what [i think] icy's getting at.

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HecticDialectics

Some of you are just starting to sound jealous imo... can't afford the Gucci zoas so you're lashing out and blaming the label -_-

 

 

:o omg! Someone needs to come out with some anti-designer emo zoas and give them away for free! I vote that all you people complaining put your money where your mouth is!

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like Gucci shoes, for the NAME, not just the cool-ness of said piece. I see it all the g.d. time, and THAT's what [i think] icy's getting at.

Gucci is more than shoes, I think, and is a corporation. Zoas are not owned by one central entity. Each person sets the price.

 

You shouldn't be ranting on the names, so much as the people who sell them ate a high price because of their name.

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If people would use ZoaID.com to make sure that it isn't already named, then there wouldn't be any double nameing the same morph.

 

People don't though, and there is no one stopping people from starting new names or calling what they have (be it close tot he truth or far from it) by a certain name. Even if they did use it, photos lack the accuracy needed for being certain on if a zoa falls in a category or not. Not to mention the variation with in some names appears to be as big as the variation outside of a name. On top of that there is further variation dependent on lighting, i.e. my Super Zoa's might look orange and green under my lights and yet like bags of poop under yours and vise versa.

 

I like the flower analogy on this - you get a daylily for example, genus Hemerocallis. The difference in species is small enough that the average person can't tell - just like Zoanthus. But every color and pattern has its own name (Franz Hals, for example), just like what we've done to Zoanthus. It's not a taxonomic difference, but rather a color difference.

 

There's nothing wrong with that. If it looks like PPE, then call it PPE. I don't care if it's lineage came from Blane Perun or anyone else (how do we know that the LFS down the road didn't just happen to get zoanthids from the same location that his came from anyway?). It's just a simple way to describe the color morph exhibited (at least to me, and I'm sure many others), not the genetic variation of a coral.

 

Thats not whats happened though, people would less likely object if that were the case. Each colour doesn't have a name, and each name doesn't have a single colour variation. It's all about consistancy.

 

Think in terms of domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Clearly a German Shepard and a Pug are very different and common names clarify that. If you breed those two dogs and end up with a mut, you can't just name it and call it a new breed. Just like you can't name every variation of Zoa.

 

It needs to be clear what consititues a PPE just like it is clear that a shepard is not the same as a Sheppard/ Collie who expresses pheonotypical traits that match closest to a shepard. Otherwise you end up with PPE for $15 a polyp Shepugs being sold for eleventy billion dollars.

 

do a google search for purple people eaters.

 

there's red ones, green ones,pink ones, you name it somebody's stuck purple people eater after the color. none of them look the same, and 99% aren't true purple people eaters.

 

now how in the heck does that make it easier? seems every forum has a different name for the same zoa's.

 

Icy has it right. Naming has no consistency, anyone who wants to name something just does.

 

Until

1) named groups are clearly identifiable and agreed on across communities AND

2) the introduction of new names is done in the same fashtion as to allow for agreement and identification

names will continue to mean nothing.

 

 

edit: Tense

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Many of these people buy coral because it may well look cool, but mostly because of the name. And more often than not, because they may not even like it much at all but want to frag it up and sell it. Really, it's not hard to find zoanthids you like if you're into them anyway; any morph that isn't brown is pretty cool. It's just that people will buy them just to frag them up, OR just to have the "Jesus's tears nuclear-fallout dragon baby tumors"; like Gucci shoes, for the NAME, not just the cool-ness of said piece. I see it all the g.d. time, and THAT's what [i think] icy's getting at.

 

 

What about the outrageous prices of some rics? The same thing happens with them, and no one's naming them anything cutesy. It's not the name itself that's the problem. It's the fact that people can price gouge nearly anything.

 

Icy - that is why I like the concept of ZoaID. It gives a pic, or several pics, as a "standard" for the coloration of the zoas.

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HecticDialectics
Naming has no consistency, anyone who wants to name something just does.

 

...

names will continue to mean nothing.

 

 

Buyer beware...

 

 

You all's argument is logically inconsistent. If names mean nothing and commonly fail to identify the correct zoa someone wants, then how do names (and names alone) keep fetching high prices? :X

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Some of you are just starting to sound jealous imo... can't afford the Gucci zoas so you're lashing out and blaming the label -_-

:o omg! Someone needs to come out with some anti-designer emo zoas and give them away for free! I vote that all you people complaining put your money where your mouth is!

 

Did you not see Icy's Zoas? I'd hardly call them anti-designer emo zoas, tehy look bad ass, they just don't have a meaningless name.

 

The point is to pay more for good looking corals, not good looking names.

 

Furthermore, paying more has a limiting factor most of us would call stupidity. If you can get great corals for $40 a colony, why pay $400 because someone slapped a name on it. Then again for some people a Benz isn't good enough, they would rather pay 10x for a Bugatti. At the end of the day, it's your money, spend it as you will.

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HecticDialectics
Did you not see Icy's Zoas? I'd hardly call them anti-designer emo zoas, tehy look bad ass, they just don't have a meaningless name.

 

 

Icy's socialist pricing policy doesn't match market demand... I bet he could raise the price and sell more. And God bless America! You're still allowed to sell something for whatever price you want. B) Travis said it well- people set the prices.

 

I fully support free market pricing. Sure, it sucks that a garf bonsai might run $100 an inch (more than most male prostitutes probably get paid :lol: ) or a PPE might be $40-50 a polyp, and I want one but can't afford it now... but what can ya do? I guess I could bicker and complain that my cheap, unemployed self got priced out of the market for cool coral, or I could just accept it, and continue saving up...

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Icy's socialist pricing policy doesn't match market demand... I bet he could raise the price and sell more. And God bless America! You're still allowed to sell something for whatever price you want. B) Travis said it well- people set the prices.

 

I fully support free market pricing. Sure, it sucks that a garf bonsai might run $100 an inch (more than most male prostitutes probably get paid :lol: ) or a PPE might be $40-50 a polyp, and I want one but can't afford it now... but what can ya do? I guess I could bicker and complain that my cheap, unemployed self got priced out of the market for cool coral, or I could just accept it, and continue saving up...

 

 

People will always sell things for what they can get, just like people will always pay what it's worth to them. Ticket scalping is the prime example. That doesn't mean the the dope who payed too much the night of the game couldn't have gotten the tickets cheaper (say 2 months ago). Just the same, instead of getting "PPE's" you can find a coral just as nice with a reasonable ticket price and a different name that is equally arbitrary.

 

Just cuz you can't afford $40-50 for PPE doesn't mean you can't afford nice corals. While PPE might = nice, nice doesn't = PPE.

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HecticDialectics
Just cuz you can't afford $40-50 for PPE doesn't mean you can't afford nice corals. While PPE might = nice, nice doesn't = PPE.

 

 

Well I can agree with that.

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Did you not see Icy's Zoas? I'd hardly call them anti-designer emo zoas, tehy look bad ass, they just don't have a meaningless name.

 

The point is to pay more for good looking corals, not good looking names.

 

Furthermore, paying more has a limiting factor most of us would call stupidity. If you can get great corals for $40 a colony, why pay $400 because someone slapped a name on it. Then again for some people a Benz isn't good enough, they would rather pay 10x for a Bugatti. At the end of the day, it's your money, spend it as you will.

 

Except his zoanthids have been tagged with a name, they're called Eagle Eyes, whether he wants to refer to them as such or not.

 

Its really a lose lose situation, because as soon as someone starts bringing up the idea of tracing lineage then we get into the "LE" mess and everyone who doesn't feel that the corals are worth the price calls everyone who feels that they do "elitist."

 

 

Let me pose a simple question. If you went to a guys house to look for zoa's and he had the nicest assortment you've ever seen, would you not buy what he had simply because they were all named? AND, if you did buy some of the more expensive ones, would you just throw out whatever name they had and charge drastically less than you paid for them?

 

 

Also, are you guys implying that I'm a sucker for paying $10/polyp for some of the nicest zoanthids that I've ever seen because I could've gotten them when they were first imported for a lot cheaper? I honestly don't see how the ticket scalper/buyer works in this situation.

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I don't like the whole naming thing, but only because I can't be bothered to learn the names.

 

I've bought tons of nice zoa colonies for 30-50$ some nice frags for 10-20 or even free, however I have paid $100 for a frag before, it was maybe 20 polyps and a very nice blue, I don't know the name nor do I care. It looks amazing and thats what maters. I will probably look it up when I sell a frag but other then that its not that important.

 

I assume you are refering to North American fish breeders. All the reef shops in the Toronto area get their shipments from different suppliers.

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I'll confess . . . .

 

I wanted to know the name of a Zoa hitchhiker, on some LR...

 

SO nobody responded except people who wanted to have frags from the blue zoas. SO I called them blua zoas, and sold them for a Gazzillion dollars....

 

God, I love Capitalism...

 

Personal note: if you don't want to see theads saying ""What is this Zoa"" dont read it. That seems simple enough, otherwise, maybe it is some poor soul like myself who was rather freaked about 4 Zoas growing rapidly and wondered IF they actually had names. and not to resell them....

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reefman225gal
I'll confess . . . .

 

I wanted to know the name of a Zoa hitchhiker, on some LR...

 

SO nobody responded except people who wanted to have frags from the blue zoas. SO I called them blua zoas, and sold them for a Gazzillion dollars....

 

God, I love Capitalism...

 

Personal note: if you don't want to see theads saying ""What is this Zoa"" dont read it. That seems simple enough, otherwise, maybe it is some poor soul like myself who was rather freaked about 4 Zoas growing rapidly and wondered IF they actually had names. and not to resell them....

If you made a gazzillion dollars can i be your friend? :P:wizard::flower:
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Friends are expensive..... :D

 

I would need to ID more Zoas, on the website, then sell them. Then we can be friends. If you buy some of my selfishly named Zoas, It would speed up the process.. B)

 

:wacko:

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