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Phytoplankton is an amazing thing to add to your reef for a myriad of reasons.
Live Phytoplankton is a highly nutritious and highly abundant resource in the ocean, to the point that Phytoplankton is consumed by species in the ocean ranging from the smallest Zooplankton, up through a Blue Whale!
Most people know of Phyto as a super nutritious Fish and Coral Food, but one of the amazing bonuses of Live Phyto is it's affect on nutrient levels in your aquarium. Everything else we feed is polluting your water with nutrients, from the moment its introduced to the water, until it's consumed, raising your phosphates and nitrates. Live Phyto is actually consuming these same nutrients as it floats around your tank until it is consumed.
Live Phytoplankton feeds your coral, and fish, the reef inhabitants you bought, but the main benefit to Live Phyto for us, and why we call it the foundation of a stable reef, is the populations of new reef inhabitants that will fill in your ecosystem once the presence of phytoplankton is there: Rotifers, Copepods, Amphipods, Isopods, Feather Dusters, just to name a few.
How to use:
What's most important with Phytoplankton is consistency, both in quantity and frequency. To maintain strong and healthy Zooplankton populations, daily addition of phytoplankton is necessary. While a day here and there missed will not crash a population generally, 2 days in a row without fresh phytoplankton, or every other day consistently tends to put strain on the Zooplankton.
We culture Nannochloropsis & Tetraselmis separately and blend them together each week to create greater variety in each dose!
A good starting dose recommendation is 1mL per 3g, per day. From there see how the small populations of invertebrae develop to consume what you're providing and decide how you want to adjust from there.
If you dose to much too quickly, and there aren't enough mouths to consume it, the phytoplankton will continue to multiply, eventually turning your entire tank into a phytoplankton culture. Sounds scary, and definitely looks alarming to come home too, but, it will not crash your tank. In fact, your corals will probably look better than even. The stop/correct an algae bloom, just very frequent water changes. 20-30% multiple times a day if possible until it stops.
Should I turn off my skimmer?
We do not. If you have a sump underneath your tank, and water turn over to the sump is at a normally 8-10x turnover per hour, we find dosing right to the tank leaves almost no live phytoplankton making it into the skimmer, and those that do, certainly don't even up there quickly after dosing, so we wouldn't want to go through prolonged periods without skimming, but if phytoplankton goes through a skimmer, it will get sucked out.
Always smell your Phytoplankton before use and never dose a foul bottle. Trust me - you will know. If you're questioning if it's gone bad - it probably hasn't - it's far worse than skimmate and used in biochemical warfare because of its extremely foul odor.