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[justdiy]

I just finished reading your article regarding the toxicity of artificial salt mixes.

Your findings are pretty damaging to certain brands of salt.

I was wondering if your research has been mirrored or reproduced by others, and also, what company(s) or organization(s) provided the funding for your study.

[Brisc0]

Mr. Shimek,

I have also just read your article on the toxicity of salt brands and wanted to ask you a question. I noticed above table 4 there was some information that startled me.

"The data for Instant Ocean and Coralife salts are from Atkinson and Bingman, 1999. The data for Marinemix–Bioassay Formula were provided by the manufacturer. The data for Bio-Sea Marinemix are the average of two samples in the advertising literature from the manufacturer."

I was curious of your feelings about taking two brands that were analyzed by an unbias 3rd party (who appear to be 3rd rate at best in the data provided) vs. the often slanted manufacturers claims of the brands that appeared to shine in this comparison. I am also interested in the answers to the questions above, your feedback would be much appreciated to make me more comfortable with what I consider to be circumstantial data at best. I have no intention of coming off as brash or rude in my inquiry, however this data IMO appears very damaging, and I feel deserves a level of candour in the inquiries of how it was obtained. Thank you for your time and attention it is greatly appreciated.

[rshimek]

Originally posted by justdiy

Hi,

I just finished reading your article regarding the toxicity of artificial salt mixes.

Your findings are pretty damaging to certain brands of salt.

Yup, it should be. Certain brands of salts are poorly formulated.

I was wondering if your research has been mirrored or reproduced by others,

Of course, this is why the EPA only certifies certain brands of salts as being useful in bioassay tests. What I did was nothing new, I merely did the tests and presented the results in the context of the aquarium hobby.

and also, what company(s) or organization(s) provided the funding for your study.

My research support was clearly stated and acknowledged in the article. It was not supported by any company.

[rshimek]

Originally posted by Brisc0

Hi,

I was curious of your feelings about taking two brands that were analyzed by an unbias 3rd party (who appear to be 3rd rate at best in the data provided) vs. the often slanted manufacturers claims of the brands that appeared to shine in this comparison. I am also interested in the answers to the questions above, your feedback would be much appreciated to make me more comfortable with what I consider to be circumstantial data at best. I have no intention of coming off as brash or rude in my inquiry, however this data IMO appears very damaging, and I feel deserves a level of candour in the inquiries of how it was obtained. Thank you for your time and attention it is greatly appreciated.

The data of the tests are not circumstantial, theyare well supported and statistically signficant.

The cause of the mortalities is open to question. I suggested that the cause is due to the pronounced amounts of heavy metals found in some of the salts and not others. That mortality may also be due to some other causes (subsequent tests have shown that IO salt also has some organic materials in it that cause problems in culturing other organisms).

I could not analyze the salts myself. Those tests are expensive and I simply didn't have the money. I used instead the sources indicated. While manurfacturer lists of contents may be suspect, they are no more or less suspect than any other of the sources I have used.

But, even so they are immaterial. This test was NOT an attempt to determine the cause of the differences in the salts tested. It was simply a test to show that the salts WERE different in their ability to support the life.

[babar]

do you have any information regarding tropic marin brands? Also can you comment on the validity of this assay as a measure of water contamination. is this sea urchin larvea method a recognized measure of toxicity of water contanminants? A very interesting article.

Babar

[rshimek]

Hi,

I no data regarding Tropic Marin. The sea urchin larval bioassay is probably the most universally used test in the world for sea water contamination. It is used, literally, by every testing agency there is.