This article is a review of the new Internet e-magazine Marine Aquarist. This site is located at http://www.aquacraft.net/.

Marine Aquarist is a site owned and operated by the aquarium product manufacturer Aqua Craft. The site, like Aqua Craft’s products, is dominated by the marine hobby, but the email I received announcing the site promises a new freshwater area as well, although it was not yet delivered as of 2000/04/10.

First a few notes about the site itself. It has a refreshingly simple lay out and loads quickly. The text is large and easy to read for the most part, but unfortunately the text seems to be seems to be suffering from OCR disease. This disease results from scanning hardcopy text with optical character recognition (OCR) software and then not eye-checking the spelling of the result. The symptoms are an abundance of spelling mistakes that no human would ever make. For example "deionized" appears as "cleionized" and "demonized" in various spots.

The informational content of this site is still pretty thin (as of 2000/04/10) with only a few topics covered. But there are several very thorough articles concerning a single topic: the "S-15 Report", which is a 1993 chemical analysis of fifteen commercially available marine salt mixes. The site reports on the results of thirteen of these salt mixes: Tropic Marin, Reef Crystals, Instant Ocean, Coralife, Crystal Sea (formerly known as Forty Fathoms), Deep Ocean, hW Marinemix, Marine Art, Red Sea, New Ocean, Marine Environment, Bio-Sea, and Coral Marine. The last three of these are manufactured by Aqua Craft, the site owner.

The results presented from the S-15 Report show that the three Aqua Craft products, (Coral Marine, Bio-Sea, and Marine Environment) fair very well against the competition. In fact, its claimed that Marine Environment scored highest with 100 out of a possible 100 quality points. Bio-Sea scored second with 90. And Coral Marine scored third with 79. The score ranking is reflected in the price, as Marine Environment is Aqua Craft’s most expensive mix, followed by the slightly less expensive Bio-Sea, and the still cheaper Coral Marine. The listed competitors’ mixes all did relatively poorly, with all scoring less than 60 and most scoring in the 20s and 30s. Can Aqua Craft’s products really be so much better than their competitors?

I had several questions. First of all, fifteen salts were tested in the S-15 Report, but the results of only thirteen were presented. What are the other two salts and how did they do? Was the testing independent and unbiased? If so, was the scoring system part of the independent report, or did the site owners make it up?

So… I decided to look into the S-15 report and try to see if the Marine Aquarist claims regarding it are supportable. The result is this article.

The first thing I did was look into the independence of the report. The article Synthetic Sea Water vs. Synthetic Sea Water(http://www.aquacraft.net/s9911.html) claims that the S-15 report "was commissioned and paid for by Global Scientific Publications". It is assured that "GSP is not in any way affiliated with any manufacturer of sea salts". This may well be so, but I can find no information on GSP on the Internet or in the library; either who they are or what else they have published. Hmmm.

Regardless of who paid for it, the study was conducted by an independent laboratory; Anresco Inc. of San Francisco, along with the Environmental Trace Substances Research Center at the University of Missouri.

Still curious about the two salt mixes not mentioned in Marine Aquarist, I emailed Aqua Craft and asked them. They promptly said that the two missing salts are Sera and Ultra Marine. These analyses are to be added to the site in the future, but they also indicated that Sera and Ultra Marine did poorly, with quality scores of 40 (Sera) and 19 (Ultra Marine). I later found some more (incomplete) information on the S-15 analyses of Sera and Ultra Marine at the web site http://www.corallarium.com/tabella.html.

My next question was concerning the quality points rating system, where Aqua Craft’s products apparently trounce the competition. By carefully reading How To Judge A Good Marine Salt (http://www.aquacraft.net/s9910.html) I suspect (but can’t really be sure) that the point system was not part of the S-15 report. I believe that the point system is Aqua Craft’s own, and is weighted to make their products look as good as possible. Aqua Craft does however use the S-15 data legitimately for the scoring.

And I also have some concerns regarding the presentation of the thirteen analyses that are included in Marine Aquarist. In the presented tables, those measurements that differ significantly from that of sea water are printed in red. Only a single measurement is printed in red in two of Aqua Craft’s products: Coral Marine and Marine Environment, which have red-printed bromide measurements. Their third product, Bio-Sea, has no red print at all. This gives the impression that the black-dominated analyses of the Aqua Craft products are much closer to sea water than the red-festooned analyses of the others. But on closer inspection, it is clear that there is a real distinction between what constitutes a "significant difference" in their products and in their competitors’.

For example, the sulfate measurements of the two Tropic Marin samples are 2513 mg/L and 2367 mg/L, which differ from the sea water measurement of 2700 mg/L by 12.3% and 6.9%. Both of these measurements are printed in red, indicating deviant values. However the measurements for Bio-Sea are 3357 mg/L and 3178 mg/L. These are twice as divergent from the sea water value as those of Tropic Marin (differing by 24.3% and 17.7%). Nevertheless, the Bio-Sea measurements are printed in black.

Clearly, the authors of the Marine Aquarist used a great deal of license when presenting the results of the S-15 report; only discussing that information that favors their products and only discussing this information in a highly biased light. However, there is no reason to believe that the S-15 report itself is unbiased, or that the measurements that Marine Aquarist includes are misreported. So assuming that the data supplied in the printed analyses are accurate, unbiased, and factual, what claims made by Marine Aquarist regarding this data are supportable and which ones are just so much advertising copy?

Marine Aquarist’s abundant warnings that several manufacturers’ salts mix to a dangerously high pH is easily supported. Tropic Marin, New Ocean, Instant Ocean, Reef Crystals, hW Marinemix, Deep Ocean, and Crystal Sea all had at least one sample with a pH over 9, one hour after the salts were mixed with deionized water. Anyone using these salts should allow them to sit under aeration over night and then check the pH in the morning before introducing animals.

Marine Aquarist claims that Reef Crystals has a similar composition to Instant Ocean, which is made by the same manufacturer. This is supportable. Reef Crystals sell for some 25% more than its sister product, Instant Ocean, but it is hardly worth the extra money. The Reef Crystals package specifically claims that this product is enriched with "extra calcium", while the analyses give no indication of this. One of the two Reef Crystal samples actually has a little less calcium than did an Instant Ocean sample. And in fact, none of the Reef Crystals’ measured values were significantly different from those of Instant Ocean.

Marine Aquarist claims that several manufacturers sell underweight bags. That is, when the salt contained in the package is mixed with the quantity of water indicated, the result is water with a lower specific gravity than sea water. This is true. Coralife, Crystal Sea, hW Marinemix, and Tropic Marin all create water with a significantly lower specific gravity than sea water. When comparing the prices of salt bags, the consumer must be aware of this, as one would have to buy more of these to make the same amount of proper aquarium water.

Marine Aquarist denigrates several mixes as being "wet", that is, having an excessive amount of moisture. This is hogwash. All the mixes are between 11% and 18% moisture, with most between 15% and 17%. (And Aqua Craft’s three products are also all between 15% and 17%). Clear misrepresentation is in fact that the competitive product New Ocean is described as being "wet" in The Facts About New Ocean, (http://www.aquacraft.net/w0020.html) even though its moisture content is second lowest (after Red Sea), at 13.9%.

Marine Aquarist states that marine mixes are often bromide deficient. This is true. Only BioSea, Marine Environment, New Ocean, Red Sea, and Marine Art are not, among the thirteen reported. The article The Importance of Bromide (http://www.aquacraft.net/sf9904.html) states that bromide has a synergistic relationship with iodide. I have not been able to confirm this, as no reference was given. And the definitive reference book on reef aquarium keeping, Delbeek and Sprung’s The Reef Aquarium, makes no mention of it. So my question as to whether or not bromide is required by marine organisms needs further investigation.

There is one more point about bromide that should be made. Marine Environment’s analysis pertaining to bromide is confusing. It shows a value of < 10 mg/L, which is about 1/6 the sea water value, but also has the note "(55ppm in #2)". Does this note mean that the contents of the "little bottle" that is included with Marine Environment (the so-called "#2") is 55mg/L bromide (as it seems to say), or that the Marine Environment salt water sample had 55mg/L bromide after #2 was added? If the former is true, then Marine Aquarist’s claim that Marine Environment has sufficient bromide is false.

It is clear from the variations in the trace element concentrations of all the manufacturers that their claims regarding the purity of their products are outlandish. And their claims of having more trace elements than the others are bizarre. All mixes have the same number of trace elements…and in all cases most of these trace elements are in the mix simply as a result of their presence as a contaminant in the stock salts (which are never of research grade purity). As a result, all mixes have more than 70 trace elements in them (just like the salt in your salt shaker does), but nobody deliberately adds anything like 70 trace elements to their mixes.