Mary Jane

Mary Jane is a named zoanthid from the collector era of the hobby: a green disc carrying pink and purple tones across its face, filed in the master strain queue in one line as a green disc with pink and purple face tones. The colour story is the identification. Green alone belongs to a dozen staple morphs, and pink and purple faces appear across the family; the combination on one polyp, green underneath with the face warming into pink and purple, is the check a buyer should run under neutral light before trusting a label.

The strain's standing in the hobby is measurable. In March and April 2024, Reef Builders and Zoanthids.com ran the Reef Royale Bracket Challenge, a 64-entry popularity bracket drawn from the hottest zoas and palys in circulation, played out on social stories. Mary Jane advanced to the Final Four and lost its semifinal to Stratosphere by 67 to 33 percent, on the same weekend Grandmaster Krakatoa beat Utter Chaos in the other semifinal. A Final Four finish in a field seeded with the era's headline morphs places this strain in the top tier of keeper recognition, years after its name first circulated.

Longevity supports that standing. A featured keeper tank on Nano-Reef, a zoanthid and palythoa dominant eight-gallon nano, lists OG Mary Janes among its holdings alongside Blue Hornets, Red Hornets, Gobstoppers and Fruit Loops — company that shows the strain holding a place in a serious collector's garden. An older keeper letter on WetWebMedia, written about a tank the keeper had run for about three years, names half of a Mary Jane zoanthids colony among the losses in a soft-coral decline event and passes along the period's word on the strain: rare to begin with. The name has travelled through at least two hobby generations.

Colour deserves the same care the other staged strains received, because the written record gives the face in two related dialects. The master queue describes a green disc with pink and purple face tones. A keeper build thread on FishLore records buying a single polyp of Mary Jane zoas at a local fish store and names the draw directly: love the purple pink colouration. Both accounts agree on the palette and differ only in which tone leads. Spectrum explains much of that spread — blue-heavy light pushes purple forward, daylight lets the pink read stronger — so the entry holds both descriptions and judges a colony by the combined read: green disc, face in the pink-to-purple range, checked under light close to neutral.

Care follows the zoanthid pattern with one strain-specific adjustment, and the adjustment matters. The family is hardy, photosynthetic, and forgiving across a wide parameter range, and Reef To Go's standard reef parameters suit it: temperature 77–79°F, salinity near 35 ppt (about 1.024–1.026), alkalinity 8–10 dKH held steady, calcium 400–450 ppm, with low but detectable nitrate and phosphate. Family guidance read for this entry adds the working bands: light at 50–150 PAR, gentle to moderate flow, nutrients detectable with nitrate in the 5–20 ppm range and phosphate around 0.03–0.10 ppm supporting spread. Zoanthids carry no calcium skeleton, so the colony itself makes no dosing demand; stability does the work.

The adjustment is light and patience at the start. This strain carries a melt record, detailed in the field notes, and the experienced advice in that same discussion places the difficult zoas low, around 80 PAR, with nutrients kept up. A new Mary Jane frag should start at the bottom of the tank in that lower band, stay there until it has opened fully for a sustained stretch, and move up only in small steps spaced weeks apart. A keeper who treats this morph with the family's usual shrug and parks it high on day one is repeating the setup behind several of the loss reports.

Flow should be moderate and indirect. The working pattern sweeps debris and filamentous algae off the mat, brings food-bearing water across the polyps, and leaves the colony open. Feeding is a light supplement: occasional particulate coral food or fine plankton, broadcast or gently target-fed a few times weekly with flow paused about 10–15 minutes, supports colour and budding in the family record.

Placement should plan for a spreading mat on an island rock, lower to middle, with the standard 2-inch clearance. Family guidance is blunt about zoanthid spread — colonies extend their coenenchyme mat across rock and bud new polyps along the edges, transforming bare rock into fields of colour — and an island keeps that energy inside a boundary a keeper can defend. Fragging follows the family's easy pattern, which is how a named morph like this one moved from tank to tank across the years behind its bracket run.

Pests deserve a check on any new frag: zoa-eating nudibranchs, spiders and sundial-type snails travel on new material across the family, and a dip plus a close look before placement protects the whole garden. Handling follows the family safety rule at full strength: some zoanthids and palythoas can carry palytoxin, no visual check separates a carrying colony from a clean one, so gloves and eye protection go on for every handling or fragging session, care is taken around open cuts, the coral is kept away from high heat, and hands and tools are washed thoroughly afterwards.

Field notes — what keepers report

- The popularity record is the loudest keeper evidence this strain has. Reef Builders' Reef Royale bracket in spring 2024 seeded 64 of the hottest zoas and palys in the hobby and played the rounds on Facebook and Instagram stories; Mary Jane reached the Final Four and took 33 percent against Stratosphere's 67 in its semifinal, while Grandmaster Krakatoa beat Utter Chaos 61 to 39 in the other. Votes in a social bracket measure recognition as much as beauty, and a semifinal run still marks this morph as one of the four most recognised names in that field.

- The difficulty record splits, and both sides stay visible. On the hard side, a Reef2Reef keeper answering a community question about zoas that melt named this strain directly: Mary Janes melt for me, a few different tries. The same thread's experienced voices give the pattern behind such reports — the difficult zoas often want low PAR around 80 with higher nutrients, bacterial and protozoan infections arriving on new frags are underestimated, and some strains go through group melts while unrelated zoas beside them thrive.

- On the settled side, keepers hold this strain for years. The featured Nano-Reef zoa-dominant tank lists OG Mary Janes in its miscellaneous holdings, inside a mature garden of dozens of named morphs. The WetWebMedia letter shows a colony kept for about three years before a tank-wide soft-coral decline took half of it — a loss the site's answer attributes to cnidarian allelopathy in a small volume rather than to the strain itself, with weekly water changes advised over monthly.

- The price record is thin and old-fashioned, and the entry records it as found. The FishLore keeper bought a single polyp at a local fish store for $5 and praised the purple pink colouration in the same post. No current vendor listing with a live price for this strain was found in this run's searches, so no modern per-polyp figure is quoted; the $5 single-polyp record stands as the surviving price trace, from the era when this morph traded as an affordable collector staple.

- The rarity claim also stays on the record with its age showing. The WetWebMedia keeper reports hearing the strain was rare to begin with, in a letter from the period when named zoas circulated mainly through local stores and keeper trades. The 2024 bracket run argues the name stayed widely recognised long after that period. Recognition and availability are different measures, and this entry keeps the two apart: famous name, thin current listings.

- Growth reporting is the gap in this strain's record. Colonies demonstrably persist for years in keeper tanks, and no grow-out rate, budding speed or mat-spread measurement for this specific morph was found in the sources read. The Moderate growth tile is the approved default for an unknown value, flagged here so a future keeper report can replace it with evidence.