Phytoplankton
SA’s Live Marine Phytoplankton– Premium Reef Blend 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.
SA’s Live Marine Phytoplankton is a unique concentrated and cleaned live culture with no additives or preservatives.
The combined effects of SA’s Live Marine Phytoplankton– Premium Reef Blend have not been duplicated with preserved phytoplankton or any other product.
SA’s Live Marine Phytoplankton– Premium Reef Blend
Premium reef blend contains Nannochloropsis oculata, Phaeodactylum tricornutum and Chlorella with a cell size of 2 – 20 microns.
Feeding SA’s 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.