DT's or Phyto-Feast™ - Claiming "live" Does it matter?
In 2001 I started to bring the marine invertebrate food category of specialty animal feeds to the attention of both the Food and Drug Administration and various states department of agriculture. I have found that the combination of budget cuts along with the low priority of aquarium animals have caused an almost total lack of enforcement of even basic regulations being applied to these specialty animal feeds. Unfortunately, the lack of enforcement from the regulatory agencies responsible for animal feed compliance, has allowed a climate to exist where manufactures can make any claim without question.
I have been culturing and testing the survivability of phytoplankton genera for many years. Surviving refrigerated storage is very rare and unfortunately most of the species used in commercial aquaculture do not survive refrigerated storage long enough to be used for a product. Among the many genera that I have examined are Isochrysis, Pavlova and Tetraselmis. Because of my previous observations indicated that these genera do not survive storage, I have to believe that the claims that they were part of a live product were untrue. Although this report specifically address Phyto-Feast Live™, there are at least 3 other brands of refrigerated “live” phytoplankton products that claim to contain genera that were previously tested and found not to survive refrigerated storage for more then a few weeks.
Recently, a study involving two experiments comparing clam growth and survival when fed a number of phytoplankton products and refrigerated Isochrysis, Pavlova and Tetraselmis was peer reviewed and published in the science journal, Zoo Biology. The results of this study showed that clams only accepted live phytoplankton as a food and that Isochrysis, Pavlova and Tetraselmis did not remain effective as a food under refrigerated storage.
The following is a presentation of factual data that was generated through independent analysis.
Chemical analysis was conducted by an analytical chemist Dr. Rhys Thomas of Inovatia Laboratories LLC http://www.inovatia.com .
A separate study to test viability had been commissioned through Dr. Bassem Allam of the Marine Sciences research Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook.http://somas.stonybrook.edu/~MADL/faculty.html
I did not start this investigation with prior knowledge of the results. So, the nature of the analyses changed over time. For example, my original request of Inovatia Laboratories was to look for ethanol. Since they routinely analyze for methanol, ethanol, and propanol as a package, I learned more than I set out to find. In addition, Dr. Thomas mentioned in our subsequent correspondence that there was a very large and unexpected instrument response for something other than alcohols, and he wondered if I wanted him to check it out. I did, and it turned out to be another additive. As time went on, Dr. Thomas noted another unexpected response, and another additive was uncovered. Since the samples degrade over time, it was not appropriate to go back to old samples and re-analyze them for these new compounds. So, the formulation of the Phyto-Feast™ products may have changed over time, or we just may not have noticed some of the other ingredients until the right questions were asked.
One last introductory comment: After some of the analyses were completed, the product, Phyto-Feast Coral & Clam™, was dropped by Reed Mariculture and is no longer listed as a product on the Phyto-Feast web site. However, some analytical data on that product is included.
