Help needed with Chemiclean and ORP

[jda]

Way back in the 90s, I was at a meeting in St Louis and the speaker was talking about how cyano disappeared when treating fish for diseases with erythro. Of course it is at least hobby available erythro, right? I just don't know if there is anything additional in there... the skimmer goes nuts with the stuff, but I have never treated fish with antibiotics, so that could be normal.

 

[osprey101]

Analytical chemist here. When certain "scarce" terms are plucked from the MSDS for the product and put into Google, I find some interesting similarities:

"LD50 Oral Rat > 6200 mg/kg" H317 H319

Specifically, there are some striking similarities between the product's SDS and that for sulfamethoxazole. However, I do not get any good hits with "LD50 Oral Rat > 6200 mg/kg" + erythromycin.

Deformulation is one of my specialties. This is just 5 minutes' worth of Google, but I find it interesting. I'm strictly freshwater, so perhaps some saltwater chemist would have greater insights than my my own $0.02 worth.

 

[osprey101]

Analytical chemist here. When certain "scarce" terms are plucked from the MSDS for the product and put into Google, I find some interesting similarities:

"LD50 Oral Rat > 6200 mg/kg" H317 H319

Specifically, there are some striking similarities between the product's SDS and that for sulfamethoxazole. However, I do not get any good hits with "LD50 Oral Rat > 6200 mg/kg" + erythromycin.

Deformulation is one of my specialties. This is just 5 minutes' worth of Google, but I find it interesting. I'm strictly freshwater, so perhaps some saltwater chemist would have greater insights than my my own $0.02 worth.

And now that I dig some more, tylosin tartrate also matches, and is a salt, unlike sulfamethoxazole.

https://chemi-pure.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ChemiClean_SDS_US_122815_FINAL.pdf

https://northamerica.covetrus.com/content/sds/056666.pdf

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Analytical chemist here. When certain "scarce" terms are plucked from the MSDS for the product and put into Google, I find some interesting similarities:

"LD50 Oral Rat > 6200 mg/kg" H317 H319

Specifically, there are some striking similarities between the product's SDS and that for sulfamethoxazole. However, I do not get any good hits with "LD50 Oral Rat > 6200 mg/kg" + erythromycin.

Deformulation is one of my specialties. This is just 5 minutes' worth of Google, but I find it interesting. I'm strictly freshwater, so perhaps some saltwater chemist would have greater insights than my my own $0.02 worth.

I would presume that unless the formulation is a single pure compound, one could and should (IMO) adjust the LD50 for the concentration. Thus, without knowing the percentage of active agent, it’s hard to nail things down by the LD50.

Section 3 of the SDS may or may not clarify if there are inactive ingredients.

 

[taricha]

To @osprey101 point about other possible antibiotics maybe fitting MSDS closer, this review article (section 5) seems to indicate that there's quite a few antibiotics that could be used to kill cyano. Macrolides, sulfonamides, fluoroquinolones can all be cyano killers at low concentrations.

The takeaway for my thinking is that aquarium cyano killer products could come from a number of possible antibiotics so a narrow test for a specific group or comparison against a specific compound may not find the product to be a match.

 

[taricha]

Also from the review article I posted above...

"Although green algae are eukaryotes and the mechanism of toxicity to green algae is different (Gonzalez-Pleiter et al., 2013), antibiotics may still cause adverse effects to green algae due to the prokaryotic origin of semi-autonomous organelles such as chloroplasts and mitochondria (Nie et al., 2013). Thus, the toxic effects of antibiotics to green algae are related to the inhibition of chloroplast metabolisms such as protein synthesis and photosynthesis, affecting cell growth."

I suppose it's possible that low O2 issues people sometimes have with chemiclean could be due to 1) inhibition of photosynthesis of many organisms - not just the target cyano and 2) not running their skimmer.

 

[osprey101]

I would presume that unless the formulation is a single pure compound, one could and should (IMO) adjust the LD50 for the concentration. Thus, without knowing the percentage of active agent, it’s hard to nail things down by the LD50.

Manufacturer's SDS states "Proprietary Salt* (CAS No) Trade Secret 100", suggesting just one compound. Section 11.1 similarly refers to the singular, and even if the product were comprised of more than one product, it would require safety testing from scratch- you can't just average LD50s from a mixture. At that point, you'd be back to research data on a commercially available product in which you'd have that delightfully specific phrase "LD50 oral rat > 6200 mg/kg". It would seem improbable that Boyd Enterprises has the financial wherewithal to do in vivo toxicology tests on rats for such a niche problem.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Manufacturer's SDS states "Proprietary Salt* (CAS No) Trade Secret 100", suggesting just one compound. Section 11.1 similarly refers to the singular, and even if the product were comprised of more than one product, it would require safety testing from scratch- you can't just average LD50s from a mixture. At that point, you'd be back to research data on a commercially available product in which you'd have that delightfully specific phrase "LD50 oral rat > 6200 mg/kg". It would seem improbable that Boyd Enterprises has the financial wherewithal to do in vivo toxicology tests on rats for such a niche problem.

Yes, I know that's what it says, and your interpretation may be correct, although it seems a but presumptuous to think it might be an antibiotic when it is claimed to not be one, but then presume the SDS is exactly filled out correctly.

Mixtures do not require safety testing of the mixture for an SDS, and not all components get listed. Take a look at this Tide detergent SDS. If you add up the high end of the possible composition range for every component listed, 40% is still missing. Then in section 7 they give a single range for the LD50. I expect that is a weight average of the LD50 for the components, though I agree that is less than perfect in reality.

https://www.allfloridapaper.com/wp-content/uploads/MSDS/Procter-Gamble/Tide-laundry-powder-item--220075-sheet--30804.pdf

 

[MinnieMouse2]

I would not assume that the product is mutually exclusive as erythromycin or an oxidizer.

My memory is not great, but if I recall, somebody found a public PO of a large amount of erythromycin going to Boyd. Boyd denied it, which was the original reefing manufacturer lie. Boyd then printed on the box that the product contained no erythromycin succinate, or at least it did at one time, doubling down on a semi-lie. Of course, there are many other kinds of erythromycin and succinate is usually a suspension and stearate is in powder/pill form (been a long time and I could be wrong on this). Later, somebody had it tested and it did have erytho in it - I have no memory of details or how this was done. Competitors that make similar products also have said that there is erytho in their products. This was all in the ReefCentral days, so that would be where the posts are archived if anybody cares.

Personally, I think that is is erythromycin and some sort of oxidizer. The skimmers go crazy for days or a week after dosing. It does make the water really clear. Even really good GAC cannot strip the water quickly with many reactors on a tank... you just have to wait. I guess that it is possible that erythro is an oxidizer that is not easily caught by GAC and just needs to wait a number of days to break down.

If you wanted to tell me that the erythro killed most waterborne bacteria and the GAC polished them out of the water, then I would believe it.

I have not used it in a long time, but I found it perfectly safe with no side effects other than not being able to skim for a week. It takes a few days for the cyano to fully die. It has not killed it fast when I used it. Usually, the cyano stays the same for the day and just comes back weaker after the lights off/on cycle for a few days.

It has a very unique smell. I don't have any basis for comparison, but I would not be surprised if somebody recognized it. The stuff from BlueVet called like CyanoRx seems to be an exact duplicate for me.

FTIR is not expensive. NMR is expensive and jda is out of reefing money with many kids in college (out of state) and interest rates up (in real estate). Of course, you would have to have something to compare the results against... unless there is somebody who can read the results like people who can read the green falling letters on the screens in The Matrix. With the last go-around with reef manufacturer liar #56, we had another product from an honest manufacturer to directly compare against.

A quick Google search did indicate that there are ways to test fluoroquinolone with color changing things like cobalt thiocyanate, BM blue and ammonium sulfate, but I am not smart enough to make heads or tails out of them or even if erytho worked at all when some others did.

I know you raise clams. Have you used the Chemiclean in tanks that contain large clams? I have wanted to use this but all my tanks have clams in them. Also I use no skimmers in my tanks only a refugium. The clams have been my ultimate skimmers. I try to keep all toxins out.

 

[RandyC]

If somebody wants to fund the purchases and tests, I can get some of this and some chemiclean and run them up to Colorado State to have some IR run. PM me if there are any benefactors out there who would like to help out. I can do all of the work if somebody can help with the costs.

What would be the rough estimates of the cost of material and tests.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

What would be the rough estimates of the cost of material and tests.

I would be cautious in assuming success with NMR and IR. It's really mostly useful to either identify a pure compound (matching all peaks) or to rule out a compound (detecting a strong peak in the standard that is not present in the unknown).

IR and NMR are not super useful to identify compositions of mixtures since one cannot easily know which peaks go together in one compound and which peaks are associated with other ingredients.

With Vibrant, JDA was lucky that it was a single component (plus water). If it contained other molecules in addition to the algaecide, identification would be less clear.

 

[jda]

Last year, the IR was less than a hundo for a run. 2 IR and the cost to buy stuff is probably between $200-300, as a guess. However, need to be sure of what we are testing, like Dr. RHF said.

If somebody used the API EM Erythro and it made the skimmer go nuts too, then that might be worth spending a few hundo to compare to ChemiClean.

Does anybody know the exact composition of Blue Vet Red Cyano RX? I am nearly positive that this stuff is the same as ChemiClean. If we knew this, then a test could be good.

 

[taricha]

Here's how aquabiomics described[youtube] people's systems with and without Chemi- Clean. Again, it doesn't give me any reason to doubt that it's an antibiotic. :


"we've got quite a few people in the database quite a few clients who have used that product [chemi-clean] and just looking at their communities, yeah there's an effect.
It has a major impact on the on the community, and I want to contrast that - because a listener may be tempted to say "well anything you do to your tank is going to impact the microbiome" and to some extent you know that's that's a reasonable thing to think.
But I've seen some other products - there's a product from Triton - these are marketed as STN-X and RTN-X... what they claim is that they adjust the chemical environment in such a way it promotes the growth of good bacteria and inhibits the growth bad bacteria, and I use this as my counter example.
With chemi-clean, it had a big effect on the microbiome and I just haven't done the analysis to say exactly "here's the summary of what that effect is" but it's big. These other products [Triton STN-X etc] that I'm talking about had amazingly specific effects - it was like the same microbiome before and after except for one or two types.
So it's worth asking the question, know how big of an effect is it because not everything you put in your aquarium has such a huge impact as that one [chemi-clean] does."

Host:
"Was it a good impact or a negative impact?"

"I didn't see any impacts that were obviously and unambiguously bad [like killed nitrifying community, or added pathogens]. It dramatically changed the community so the community is very different if you use these products [chemi-clean] than if you don't - but in a way that people could reasonably debate about whether that was a problem or not"

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Here's how aquabiomics described[youtube] people's systems with and without Chemi- Clean. Again, it doesn't give me any reason to doubt that it's an antibiotic. :


"we've got quite a few people in the database quite a few clients who have used that product [chemi-clean] and just looking at their communities, yeah there's an effect.
It has a major impact on the on the community, and I want to contrast that - because a listener may be tempted to say "well anything you do to your tank is going to impact the microbiome" and to some extent you know that's that's a reasonable thing to think.
But I've seen some other products - there's a product from Triton - these are marketed as STN-X and RTN-X... what they claim is that they adjust the chemical environment in such a way it promotes the growth of good bacteria and inhibits the growth bad bacteria, and I use this as my counter example.
With chemi-clean, it had a big effect on the microbiome and I just haven't done the analysis to say exactly "here's the summary of what that effect is" but it's big. These other products [Triton STN-X etc] that I'm talking about had amazingly specific effects - it was like the same microbiome before and after except for one or two types.
So it's worth asking the question, know how big of an effect is it because not everything you put in your aquarium has such a huge impact as that one [chemi-clean] does."

Host:
"Was it a good impact or a negative impact?"

"I didn't see any impacts that were obviously and unambiguously bad [like killed nitrifying community, or added pathogens]. It dramatically changed the community so the community is very different if you use these products [chemi-clean] than if you don't - but in a way that people could reasonably debate about whether that was a problem or not"

Very interesting, thx!

 

[jda]

I got some pretty good evidence that API EM acts just like chemiclean and makes the skimmer go nuts and all of that. Going to order some of both and send off for IR. I will start up a thread. I think that I have some BlueVet on hand, so probably send that too. API EM is all that I can find that lists the ingredients.