GTM w/o BIND and NS Records

When you create a WideIP, the BIG-IP automatically creates the associated host record in the record store, and if the zone to which it belongs does not exist, it automatically creates that, too. As I mentioned above, even if you turn off BIND in the profile, BIND is still running. No matter what, BIG-IP uses BIND for zone management, even if BIND is not answering queries. The zone and hostname creation inserts records into local BIND. Any records in local BIND are loaded into the BIG-IP caching system (which is separate from BIND's caching mechanism), and available from there for use by the GSLB engine, DNS Cache, DNSExpress.

Said differently, when you disable BIND in the profile, you are telling BIG-IP that BIND cannot be used to resolve queries. That's generally a good idea (BIND is much slower than DNS Cache and DNSExpress and it is generally substantially more vulnerable). However, BIND continues to run so that it can manage zones for the GSLB engine, DNS Cache and DNSExpress.

DNSExpress is most commonly used to slave zones. The zone list for DNSExpress is a list of zones which it should slave, and the associated hosts from which the zones should be transferred. So, it's unrelated to the things you modify with ZoneRunner, because those are zones and records for which the BIG-IP is master.