grow sps.........got milk?

[asylumdown]

And I was just reading the wikipedia page on honey. Honey is basically just a super dehydrated glucose-fructose solution. What ratio of glucose to fructose will depend on what the bees have been feeding on.

I don't see how adding honey to a tank is any different than dosing sugar. What makes honey special is the fact that it's a "supercooled liquid', meaning that it remains in some sort of liquid form well below it's melting point because of the innate properties of super-saturated glucose-fructose solutions.

It does have amino acids in it, but according to wikipedia, they account for 0.05-0.1% of it's composition, so not exactly a major contributor. I strongly suspect that to dose the equivalent amount of amino acid via honey that you'd get from a single frozen cube of mysis shrimp, you'd need to add so much that your tank would crash in an opaque cloud of bacterial anoxia.

It's got a tiny fraction of organic acids (like 1% or less). They're pretty common organic molecules, like citric, lactic, formic and butyric acid. Perhaps they do something in a reef tank, but you'd be adding very, very small amounts of them at a 'safe' dose of honey.

but yah, as soon as that drop of honey hits your water, it stops being "honey". Everything that makes it unique as a substance, from it's texture to it's viscosity, to it's 'super-cooled liquid' state, to it's anti-microbial properties, is related to it being a super dehydrated sugar solution. Add a drop of honey to a body of water a trillion times it's volume and it's just sugar and a teeny tiny amount of other relatively common organic molecules.

As far as a sugar additive goes, it's probably no more or less beneficial than any other sugar molecule. Table sugar is sucrose, which is a glucose and fructose molecule stuck together, so you're not really adding anything different than when you add just regular old sugar.

[asylumdown]

hmmmmm, the more I read about this fat thing the more I'm intrigued:

http://www.int-res.com/articles/meps/76/m076p295.pdf

I highly doubt corals can take up fatty acids directly from the water, the ones they get externally likely come from food. However, while some marine bacteria have the metabolic pathway to synthesize the polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) that most animals can't make on their own, I've found another study that showed bacteria are certainly capable of absorbing it directly from the environment if it's present, and that it will change the lipid profile of the bacteria when it does.

I'd be interested to see if adding milk to a tank alters the lipid profile of the bacteria the corals were feeding on, and in turn altered the lipid profile of the coral. Increasing the supply of certain essential fatty acids that the coral doesn't make on it's own, or doesn't get enough of from it's zooxanthella might encourage different concentrations/expressions of pigment proteins.

I suspect the 'dangerous' part relates to the gigantic supply of carbohydrate in milk, and the huge amount of carbon you'd be adding to the water in general. It would probably be pretty easy to OD and kill things.

[kien]

I love me some good 'ol fashioned sciencey threads. Especially when Adam starts throwing down enzymes, lipids and acids, oh my !