July 2016 Meeting
Gabriel Andrade hosted our July meeting at his home in Montgomery Village, MD. There were about 15 in attendance. It was one of the best catered meetings of all time. What a great spread of food. Thanks Gabriel you rock.
Kris Weinhold started the meeting off talking briefly about two amazing upcoming events. The first is the Aquatic Experience happening in Chicago the first week of November. The second is the AGA convention happening in April 2017 in Denver, Colorado.
The guest Speaker was Jeffrey Funk who gave a talk based on and titled: Aquarium analysis of trace metals. Jeffery, who has a PhD in chemistry, and a love of terrestrial gardening entered into the aquarium hobby with a love of plants and planted tanks. He is interested in the science of plant care and nutrient uptake.
He decided to run test to see if he could measure what trace metals plants were using and or lacking. In his testing, using the classic EI dosing method he found that his plants were using up all or most of the Manganese, while Iron was in excess.
He then started testing and comparing the major brands of trace mineral mixes out there. Some have published chemical analysis others he ran tests on using fancy lab equipment available to him through his job. Jeffery compared CSM, Miller, Tropica and the ADA trace mixes. Although some were better than others he found all of them to have a ratio were Iron was in excess of the amount of manganese leading to deficiency.
His solution is to dose Manganese. Jeffery recommends only using chelated Manganese.
Jeffery has in the past, and continues to offer testing of trace metals present in tank water to GWAPA members. If you are interested, please look on the forum for guidelines on have to package and ship samples to be tested.
Below are some pictures of the host’s tanks. Please enjoy.
