[DIYbio] Re: DIY media for bioluminescente algae

Plant fertilizers are great if the goal is to be able to tell any ten year old how to grow their own dinos, but if you're growing them yourself in massive amounts (love to hear how massive, and why!), you're much better off buying the Micro Algae Grow Mass Pack (without silicate) from here:

http://florida-aqua-farms.com/secure/agora.cgi?product=MICRO_MACRO_NUTRIENTS

$20 plus shipping will buy you a whole kilo of dry nutrients (just add salt water), which is enough for 10,000 liters! At that rate, you'll probably pay a lot more to filter or sterilize the salt water than on the nutrient mix...

Patrik

On Monday, August 27, 2012 2:59:48 PM UTC-7, Patrik D'haeseleer wrote:

The official medium (L1 or f/2) is mostly nitrate by weight, so we figured we'd give plant fertilizers a try. I like liquid Miracle-Gro, because it's easiest to find and work with, but pretty much everything we've tried works. You just get more trouble with cyanobacterial contamination at higher fertilizer concentrations, presumably because the phosphorus content is much higher than in the official medium.

We used salt water from a local aquarium store, but you should be able to avoid contamination issues by sterilizing the water, or mixing your own from filtered water plus sea salts.

On Monday, August 27, 2012 2:55:05 PM UTC-7, Patrik D'haeseleer wrote:

We've been doing lots of DIY growth experiments with P. lunula at BioCurious lately. In fact, we handed out around 250 vials with dinoflagellates for people to take home at Maker Faire a coupel months ago, along with this "Care & Feeding" link:

http:// TinyUrl.com / MyPetDinos

(To be updated with more recent results soon.)

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