Concentrated & Cleaned Live Phytoplankton   

One of the important aspects of DT's Live Marine Phytoplankton is to provide a clean live food without the contaminants from the culture media used to grow phytoplankton. Phytoplankton is grown with culture media containing; nutrients, vitamins, ferric chloride, EDTA, cobalt chloride, zinc sulfate, copper sulfate, manganese chloride, and sodium molybdate. Phytoplankton that is cultured in media that is low in nutrients will quickly loose its nutritional value, therefore for phytoplankton to be at its highest nutritional value it must be harvested while the media is still high in nutrients.  

Nutrient removal is necessary because high nutrient levels in packaged live phytoplankton will cause bacteria blooms, that will kill off some of the live phytoplankton, and quickly degrade the product while in storage.                                                                                                             

Metals are a much more serious problem. Several articles have been written concerning the buildup of metals in reef aquariums along with theories suggesting they may be the cause of mysterious tank crashes. I for one believe the theories have merit, metals are building up as a precipitant and may be released back into solution from a ph drop, resulting in a toxic environment that kills off the tank. If there is even a chance this is factual we do not want to add to the problem.

DT's Live Marine Phytoplankton has been processed specifically for the safe use in a reef aquarium. The closed system environment of a reef aquarium is especially sensitive to metals and possibly also to nutrients found in the culture media used to grow phytoplankton. DT’s Plankton Farm utilizes their concentrating process in a cell washing procedure to remove nutrients and metals that are necessary to culture phytoplankton. This procedure is done by repeatedly adding and extracting clean saltwater to remove most of the residual culture media.  The result is washed live phytoplankton cells that will not cause any buildup of nutrients or metals in your reef aquarium.