Aquavitro, the science behind it?

[Ian Holdich]

Hey peeps, my LFS has just started to stock the Aquavtiro range. I have always rated Seachem products(although they have never done an all in one fert), they still make decent plant products.

This is the new range from Seachem, it's supposed to be more exclusive than the florish range, and not available online in the UK, just from stockists only. I'm just trying to get some understanding behind the products, i have just got myself a bottle of this to try...

http://www.aquavitro.com/products/envy.html

I understand that plants need amino acids and the like, but we don't as planted tank keepers normally dose things like this do we. I have read of a couple of ADA products that do the same.

here's the other products

http://www.aquavitro.com/products/plant.html

theres an N and P product, but they claim to add 3 kinds of N. Which is different from the norm??

 

[ceg4048]

Plants produce all the amino acids they need from the raw materials you feed them like NPK + Carbon. They do not uptake amino acids, in fact they are more likely to eject amino acids as well as other proteins and waste into the environment. This is more snake oil. Amino acids are organic compounds used as building blocks for proteins and enzymes. I mean, the job of plants is to produce proteins. That's what they do best. Giving a plant amino acids is like selling ice cubes to Eskimos. There are about 20 amino acids, half of which the human body cannot fabricate, so the only way to get those is to...wait for it...eat some plants (or eat animals who eat lots of plants, i.e meat and dairy products).

Three kinds of N. That's just great. Yes, N comes in different flavors, regular and radioactive. So I'm pretty sure regular n will get you anything you need. N from ammonium (NH4+) gives a plant more N per unit weight than N from Nitrate, for example. Also, NO3 has to be reduced back to NH4+ in order for the plant to use it. The plant does this by...wait for it... Enzymes built from amino acids. These are called Nitrate Reductase and Nitrite Reductase. It costs the plant more energy to convert NO3, but so what? All you need to do is add more NO3 if you really want to add more N.

NH4+ delivers more N but it's also toxic to the plant, so the plant then has to store the N from NH4+ as as non-toxic forms of N. One of the non-toxic N forms made from NH4+ is...wait for it...an amino acid called Glutamine. Take note of the suffix "*amine" and compare it to the word "amino". Do they look similar? Yes! They are and they are also related to the prefix "ammon" in ammonium/ammonia. They have to do with the simple combination of Nitrogen and Hydrogen (N and H) so you'll see various combinations of NH2 (one Nitrogen glued to two Hydrogen atoms) for example, in anything that has the "amine" or "amate" and "ammo" in anything that has NH3/NH4.

Plants manipulate NPK and Carbon to produce amino acids as easily as you manipulate the keys on your keyboard to produce words. They don't really need your help to produce amino acids and they don't really care whether they get their N from urea, ammonium or nitrate, as long as they get it. So all the prestidigitation seen with these products are an illusion of the highest order. The active ingredient will always be NPK as long as they are used in the forms that plants like the best. Also, just having NPK means nothing if the concentrations are weak. TPN+ uses two or three diffent N forms, but it is still weaker than what you can add directly with dry powders. And the powders are cheaper, so I'd advise to buy only what you can afford and NOT to pay gobs of money for ingredients in a fert that dont really matter.

Cheers,

 

[Ian Holdich]

cheers for that Clive...the bottle look nice anyways! lol.