Mangroves & More's Live Marine Phytoplankton – Naturally provides needed nutrition for your reef inhabitants, through both directly feeding some reef inhabitants and indirectly feeding others by increasing their food supply.

Animals that directly feed on phytoplankton include; clams, feather duster worms, tunicates, sponges, soft corals and zooplankton (Copepods and invertebrate larvae) that are prey for stony corals.

Mangroves & More's Live Marine Phytoplankton is a unique concentrated and cleaned live culture with no additives or preservatives.

The combined effects of the live Marine Phytoplankton have not been duplicated with preserved phytoplankton or any other product.

Feeding our Live Marine Phytoplankton to your reef aquarium will greatly increase the population and nutritional quality of copepods and other zooplankton that will be available as food for stony corals.

Phytoplankton often causes coral polyps to extend, but it does not directly feed most stony corals. The benefit provided to stony corals by phytoplankton is to increase the amount of zooplankton available for the corals to feed on. Although copepods do not need to feed on live phytoplankton, the fats that they store are determined by the fats that they consume (in other words, they are what they eat). Therefore; higher quality phytoplankton will produce more nutritious copepods.

Feeding live phytoplankton will also cause the mysid population to bloom by increasing the population of copepods that they feed on.

There is evidence that soft corals, along with Goniopora and gorgonians may also benefit from the direct consumption of phytoplankton.

DOSAGE: 1 CAP FULL/10ML TREATS 60 - 70 GALLONS

THIS ITEM WILL BE SENT IN A SIMILAR CONTAINER TO AVOID BEING DAMAGED IN TRANSIT

As an aquarium food, Tetraselmis is prized for it high lipid content. It is especially high in levels of the vital fatty acids EPA and DHA. It is also rich in certain amino acids (e.g. alanine) that promote high growth rates as well as serving as a kind of marine animal appetite stimulant. It is a good source of vitamin C and vitamin E. Better still, it has enough stores of carbohydrates (over 48 calories per 10 ml biomass) to meet the metabolic energy needs of the animals that feed on it. Carbs can amount to around 27% of its dry weight. The starches it produces are quite similar to those synthesized by land plants. Tetraselmis even has loads of color-enhancing xanthophyll carotenoids (e.g. neoxanthin, antheraxanthin, violaxanthin, and lutein), which may benefit the feeding animal by scavenging dangerous oxidizing molecules.

Tetraselmis (at least a couple of species) is also a stand-out for containing certain antibiotic compounds. Certain phenolic constituents are believed to be responsible for the antimicrobial effects of algal extracts. Supernatants and extracts of Tetraselmis suecica have been shown to resist infection by pathogenic bacteria such as Aeromona, Staphylococcus and Vibrio in fish, as well as reducing the populations of these microbes living freely in the tank water. There are probably many possible ways that these chemicals could be used in the disease prevention of captive marine animals.