phytoculture fertilizer

[Ron Popeil]

a local fellow recommended this product as a fertilzer for my microalgal cultures. 5mL per 2L bottle.

any thoughts on it?



are there other fertilizers that will work that can be found at non fish stores?

[Kathy55g]

Not recommended.

Guillard's f/2 is the appropriate fertilizer for phytoplankton. Phyto has all the nutrition the larvae will get for those all important first days of life. Don't chintz on the fertilizer.

florida-aqua-farms dot com. or reedmariculture

[Jaken]

Here is more info on Miracle-Gro fertilizer.
http://www.melevsreef.com/phytoplankton.html

http://archive.reefcentral.com/forum...n&pagenumber=1


Kathy, why do you not recommend Ron Popeil to use Miracle-Gro?

[Noof]

Ron,
Sometimes when you are in Adelaide (most people in america dont know where that is) you have to substitute some more common products for the more widely accepted versions.
I grow algae using aquasol which is a water soluble fertilizer. As far as I have read nitrogen as urea is bad, but this still has some levels of urea. I have no problems. Try them both ... see if you have any difference? I am only growing black and white osc though. It may have more difference for more difficult species
Cheers
Nathan

[Kathy55g]

Because if you feed phytoplankton to rotifers and feed rotifers to larvae, all the nutrition the larvae gets is in the phytoplankton. If it is missing a vitamin or important nutrient, so will the larvae be missing that.

If you feed the phytoplankton to the tank for greenwater, any fertilizer still in the bottle goes into the tank with the larvae. There are too many unknowns in terrestrial fertilizer to be completely comfortable doing that: heavy metals, other bad chemicals.

[Kathy55g]

Plus, I could never get it to work...
f/2 always worked for me.

And f/2 is just as inexpensive.

[Kmiec123]

You are what you EAT!! D)

[Ron Popeil]

alright thanks for the help everyone. a local guy recommended it to me since he used it on his cultures, and so i tried it out on a nanno bottle of mine, and it worked really well. a nice dramatic increase in growth. but as stated, i have no idea whats really present in it.

[billsreef]

Sure it'll grow phyto. But as Kathy mentions, the nutritional quality won't be there. I don't recall the studies, but it's been shown that missing something as simple as one vitamin can drastically affect larval fish or shrimp survival. You can buy enough f/2 in dry form from Florida Aqua Farms to grow 3,000 gallons of phyto for about $15. Cheap and it'll last a good long time once mixed by simply dropping the pH with some muriatic acid from the hardware store

[Kathy55g]

What pH are we looking for?

[Ron Popeil]

so once the you get the f/2, dropping the pH is mandatory?

[Noof]

Kathy,
would be interested to know about whether the f/2 makes any difference for my clowns. Maybe I will bite the bullet and buy some?..... 15$ + 30$P and H makes about 4000 aussie dollars! ha
..
..
The fish I breed seem pretty happy??.....?...

[billsreef]

Originally posted by Kathy55g
What pH are we looking for?

Your looking for a pH of 3 according the directions that came with my last mass pack of f/2. I mixed that batch up about 8 or 9 months ago and it's still nice and sterile

[billsreef]

Originally posted by Ron Popeil
so once the you get the f/2, dropping the pH is mandatory?

Is it mandatory, no. However, it provides a much greater shelf life by keeping the media sterile. It's that shelf life that makes buying the mass pack of f/2 economical when your not going through it very fast. When you mix it according to directions you end up with a gallon of media which is only used at a rate of 1 ml per 2.5L, so that's a lot of algae to grow

[Ron Popeil]

understood. thanks for the tip!

[MimicTang]

could u just save the rise water from your frozen food?? Sounds silly but I know its good at growing hair algae in tanks.

[billsreef]

Too much organics that would want to decay and foul the culture