Live phyto vs prepared

[Revision17]

I'm thinking of starting a few live food cultures for my aquarium. In the "foods of reefs" series of articles, the author mentions that live foods are always much better than prepared, because the food doesn't start decomposing as soon as it's added to the tank.

After doing some research, live copepods and rotifers seem to be worth the effort, at least for photosynthetic systems (with non photosynthetic systems being in a whole other ballpark in terms of feeding quantity). Though live phytoplankton doesn't appear to be worthwhile upon initial inspection.

• Cell count per ml: Shellfish diet (among other prepared concentrates) contains around 2 billion cells per ml , whereas a "dark green" phytoplankton culture contains 100 to 200 thousand cells per ml.
• Prepared concentrates can contain multiple species of phytoplankton (multiple sizes to target different filter feeders). You need multiple live cultures for multiple species (well, I suppose you could mix, but then one species might dominate another).
• "The problem with live phytoplankton is that unless you go through all the trouble to make your own cultures and harvest the phytoplankton yourself, it may be nutritionally empty. It only takes a matter of hours at room temperature for phytoplankton to become next to useless as they have used up all their nutrition. "(I know they're trying to hock a product.. so I'm not sure how much I can rely on that) While I probably wouldn't run into this problem if I made it myself, it would be somewhat annoying to misplace a bottle of phyto, and it becoming useless a few hours later.
• Tossing in 1/10 an ml of shellfish diet into the tank seems far easier than going through the whole phyto culture process. But then growing things is fun :rollface: . So this isn't too much of a disadvantage to me.

The whole, "not decomposing immediately after addition" part seems very worthwhile... however I'm not sure how it balances out with all the other negatives.

I'm interested to hear other people's opinions on live phyto vs prepared concentrates.

 

[sirreal63]

I have never added phyto to my tanks and have excellent pod production. FWIW, every time you clean the algae from the glass you just dosed phyto. I have kept gorgonians for years and never had one die and all grew just fine. I never understood adding what your tank produces on it's own though I know a lot of people add phyto with no ill effects.

 

[Peter Eichler]

What are you trying to accomplish by adding phytoplankton?