BUYING GUIDEUPDATED JUL 2026
The best zoas to start a collection.
Zoas are the cheapest way to fall down a reef-collecting hole. A single named polyp runs less than lunch, it spreads across the rock on its own, and every color pattern has a nickname and a small backstory — which is how a $20 frag quietly becomes a shelf of them. So this one's for the entry end of the market: named zoanthids worth owning, what each name actually covers, and what they've been selling for across the shops I check.
One note on the prices below: they're live — the lowest in-stock listing across the shops I check, read the moment you open the page, not a figure I typed in (which for zoas would be wrong within a month). If nothing's in stock, the line says so instead of a dead price.
What a zoa name actually buys.
A zoa name is a nickname for a look, not a species. The same polyp gets sold as one thing at one shop and something else at the next, fresh names get coined on colonies that didn't need them, and the underlying science hasn't kept up — one reef-ID writeup flatly calls the whole subject of telling these apart "chaotic at best". Two rules make buying named zoas a lot calmer for it.
First, a lot of names travel in families. A Hornet or a Dragon Eye isn't one coral — it's a group of morphs — so the cheapest one wearing the name is a specific look, not "the" coral. Second, some names really do point at one recognizable morph, and those are the ones where a low price is just a low price, not a warning sign.
The names that cover a family.
These four are umbrella names. What's listed under each is one morph out of several, so read the price as the way into the family, not the price of a single fixed thing.
A Hornet isn't one price — its morphs run from common to eye-watering — so the line below is just the cheapest one in stock, whichever that happens to be. Match it to the listing photo before you read anything into the number.
Hornet Zoanthid
14 VENDORS$5–$3990 DAYS
$15.59
Start on the Dragon Eye if you're cutting your teeth — fast, bright, and unbothered by rookie lighting. What lists now is the upgraded morph line rather than the plainer original, so read the price as buying the fluorescence, not just the name.
Dragon Eye Zoanthid
7 VENDORS$1–$5990 DAYS
$19.99
Bam Bam is most people's first named zoa, and it travels under a few morph labels — Flaming, Hyper, plain Orange — so the price below is the low end of whatever's in stock, not a fixed rate.
Bam Bam Zoanthid
10 VENDORS$5–$4090 DAYS
$19.99
Krakatoa needs the caveat: its range is the widest on the page by a distance. An ordinary polyp is entry-priced, but the top grades run many times that, so the cheapest listing below is the floor of a tall ladder — worth checking the price history before a low number reads as "the" price.
Krakatoa Paly
7 VENDORS$34–$17090 DAYS
$44.99
The names that mean one coral.
These are the dependable ones. Each name reliably points at a single, recognizable morph — so what you see is what you get, without the different-coral-wearing-the-label risk that catches out named-zoa buyers.
Rasta earns its price — but watch one trap: its mirror-image cousin, the Reverse Rasta, is a genuinely different (and separately priced) morph, so make sure the listing's the one you actually want before you pay.
Rasta Zoanthid
9 VENDORS$10–$6590 DAYS
$25.00
King Midas you can take at face value: a forgiving coral, mid-priced, and if you want one zoa that won't surprise you at either end, this is it.
King Midas Zoanthid
9 VENDORS$5–$2990 DAYS
$24.99
Utter Chaos multiplies fast, so a single frag grows into a colony worth well more than the polyp you bought — a decent argument for grabbing the small, cheap listing now instead of waiting for a bigger one.
Utter Chaos Zoanthid
11 VENDORS$26–$8590 DAYS
$29.00
Magician is the collector's pick of the group — uncommon rather than rare, which means you can land it, you just won't see it every week. That makes it the one on this page most worth watching the feed for, instead of counting on a lucky refresh.
Magician Zoanthid
12 VENDORS$5–$3990 DAYS
$10.39
One thing to know before you handle them.
Zoas and palys carry palytoxin, one of the more serious toxins in the hobby — but the risk is specific, not a reason to keep away from them. Keeping them in a display tank is fine. People get hurt when they cut, scrape, or boil colonies off rock and breathe the aerosol, which is how a CDC report traced a cluster of poisonings back to home aquariums. So when you frag or remove one, the danger is airborne: never strip a colony with boiling water, do any cutting or scraping in open air with the room ventilated, and keep other people out while you do — the CDC cases included people who never touched the coral and got sick from the mist. Gloves and eye protection on top of that. Worth taking, not worth fearing.
Where the zoa rabbit hole goes.
The catch with zoas is that they're cheap enough to keep saying yes to, and there are thousands of named morphs — this list barely scratches it. The upside is you don't have to babysit a dozen shop pages: everything new across the shops I check lands in one feed, and a free daily email rounds it up — so a morph that only turns up now and then doesn't slip past while you weren't looking.
And if the polyp-priced end stops being enough — it happens — the same live read runs across every coral type. What named corals actually cost lays out the whole spread; at the grail end, the most-hunted acros of 2026 is where a frag the size of a pinky nail can outprice every zoa on this page combined. When one of those drops, how to actually buy it is the other half of the job.
Zoa names could fill a book, and I've only seeded a slice of them. If there's a morph you're hunting that I'm not tracking — or one you think belongs on a short list like this — tell me. I'd rather track the ones reefers are actually after.