LIVE Tetraselmis Phytoplankton (Tetra)
16 fl. oz. (500mL)
16 fl. oz. (500mL)
Dosing Bottle
This product should be shipped 2 day express for best results. We offer free GROUND shipping on food overs over $50.00 as a courtesy, but it's ultimately your choice at that point to opt in to 2 day express which we highly recommend.
The problem when you buy live phytoplankton online is that it's typically sold in one of two ways: Expensive and delicious or cheap and weak. At Reef Chasers, we're fixin' to change that! Our fresh live Phytoplankton is harvested weekly and extremely dense. We've been honing our craft, and since we're doing it all in house the savings get passed on to you!
Why should you use Reef Chasers Phytobloom™ Reef Plankton to Build Your Biome™? It's simple really. Phytoplankton is the most essential base of any successful reef ecosystem. When you start feeding live phytoplankton to your reef with regularity, your corals are going to respond. EVERYTHING is going to respond! So many organisms benefit from the addition of live plankton, and our fresh, live, dense Phytobloom™ Reef Plankton is among the best available on the market at a price you can afford to pay. Phytoplankton form the beginning of the food chain for aquatic animals. Zooplankton, Krill and other filter feeders such as the corals in our reef tanks depend on this base of the food chain.
Tetraselmis Phytoplankton are small phytoplankton and typically grow to be 10-14µm. This phytoplankton makes a great coral feed and is useful to other filter feeders in your marine aquarium. Tetra phytoplankton is also very useful in the rearing of young fry through a process known as "Greening the Water" which help the fry to find the food and eat successfully during the early days of their life. Tetraselmis is a green algal genus within the order Chlorodendrales, and they are characterized by their intensely-colored green chloroplast, their flagellated cell bodies, the presence of a pyrenoid within the chloroplast, and a scale-produced thecal-wall.
It has been known since the 1990’s that corals can feed on pelagic (free-floating) microalgae, although this has been limited to octocorals. The works of Fabricius et al. (1995a,b) have shown that the corals Dendronephthya hemprichi, D. sinaiensis, Scleronephthya corymbosa and Acabaria sp. feed mainly on phytoplankton, which in the laboratory includes Nannochloropsis, Isochrysis and Tetraselmis spp.
In addition, they demonstrated that the coral Pocillopora damicornis, a species related to S. pistillata (family Pocilloporidae), showed increased growth after several weeks of daily batch feeding with the microalgae Tetraselmis suecica. They did not find such a beneficial effect of Nannochloropsis sp., which seems to be in agreement with Leal et al. (2013), in the sense that each coral species may have a specific preference for and digestive capability of certain live food particles.