Spool staining
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Hello,
I am seeing some staining on 5 of our 10 spools in one tank. They were seeded from gametophytes. I am posting a photo of one spool next to a spool without the staining. Both were seeded the same day, on the same string, and grown in the same tank, however the gametophytes on the stained spool were from a different source. The gametophytes were checked for contamination prior to seeding, and I checked the string under the microscope today. I do see something on the string but it doesn’t appear to be diatoms.
I am also attaching 2 photos from the microscope (100x magnification) of the stained string and 2 photos from the normal string. Has anyone seen this before, and did the spools perform normally (there are tiny sporophytes starting to grow)? I plan to continue to grow them out, but if I can fix this issue especially in the future I would appreciate knowing how.
thank you
@elizabeth_savage19 I can't tell for sure because it is a little blurry, but it looks to me like the little specs on seedstring in the microscope photos of the dirty spool are diatoms. This would be consistent with the brown coloring on the spool. You could dose the tank with germanium oxide to be safe.
We dose our tanks with 0.11 mL of our stock solution per 1 L of seawater in our tank. Our stock solution is made with 0.1 g of GeO2 per 200 mL of DI water (you can also make it with sterile seawater if you need to, but you should use it within a month if you do). We typically dose our tanks daily at that rate for one week and then see if we need to continue dosing. That frequency should be less if your tanks aren't flow through. Our tanks refresh at 50% a day. For a non flow through tank you can dose at 0.5 mL per liter and leave it in the tank for a week.