Originally Posted by
lion_crazz
Well, could you cite some stuff from this book that you found to be believable? I am curious as to what it had to say because I can't see anyway that Nutri-Seawater could be worth the money.
I have used artificial sea salt my whole life in this hobby and I have never occured a problem.
Sure....
All reef aquarists are well aware of how prone to disaster that their aquaria are. Aware of the precarious nature of our artificial ecosystems, most hobbyists do everything in their power to ensure that their beautiful, and expensive, creatures do not perish. Many hobbyists have safeguards for power outages, equipment malfunctions, water level problems, and chemical imbalances. It is ironic and unfortunate that all of these safety measures may be largely for naught, jeopardized by the use of artificial sea water that, due to poor formulation, may be poisoning the very animals that the hobbyist is trying to protect.
Amongst professional marine biologists, particularly those who work with invertebrate embryos, the average artificial sea water mix has been recognized for many years as an imperfect substitute for what is the perfect medium for marine animal growth, pure oceanic sea water. This is particularly for delicate organisms such as embryos (Strathmann). Marine organisms have evolved in natural sea water, and natural selection has fine-tuned their physiology to this medium. Many of these organisms do not have waterproof skins, and the well-being of the creature is directly dependent upon the solution surrounding them. While there is some toleration of variations from the "normal" condition to those that the animals are attuned, generally that tolerance is small and limited only to the range of natural variation (Prosser).
Many of these excessively high concentrations, however, do not result from feeding, or even the ridiculous and dangerous process of adding toxic metals directly to tanks in the form of additives, but instead are the direct result of the formulation of the salt mixes (Atkinson and Bingman).
So, the average number of larvae that developed in samples of water made with Instant Ocean and Coralife salts was highly statistically different, and far lower, than the number found developing in natural sea water.
These data are unequivocal and quite disturbing. They show that water mixed from some artificial salt water mixes is significantly more toxic to developing sea urchin embryos, and by inference to other organisms
then hobbyists would just have to learn to live with it. Or rather they would learn which species of potential reef aquarium animals were more tolerant of such abuse and could survive in it.
the mortality of sea urchin embryos in water made from Instant Ocean is about 90%, and in water made from Coralife salt the mortality rate is about 80%. It is highly likely that mortality effects are not limited to larvae and are much more widespread through the reef aquarium hobby.
The artificial sea water mixes have been chemically analyzed, and some of their metallic constituents have aberrantly high levels compared to natural seawater.
The data are rounded to the nearest whole number and it can seen that for the known toxic elements of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, vanadium and zinc, the concentrations of these elements in Instant Ocean are 342, 450, 210000, 213, 97 and 83 times, respectively, the value of normal sea water. Similar values are found for Coralife salt.
The two salts, Instant Ocean and Coralife, that made artificial seawater with the lowest survivorship of larvae consistently have heavy metals concentrations hundreds to hundreds of thousands times those found in natural seawater.
:happyfish
