Adding More Copper to our Trace Mix

[FishWorks]

Hi,

I been looking at Trace mixes and thinking if I should add more copper to my mix?

Here is my current mix:

Chemical Salt (Trace %)	Amount of Chemical Salt (Amount of Trace)	Trace Element Percent of Total Weight
DTPA Fe (Fe 11%)	170g (18.7g)	8.29%
MnSO4.H2O (Mn 32%)	29g (9.28g)	4.11%
ZnSO4.H20 (Zn 35%)	3.1g (1.085g)	0.48%
CuSO4.H20 (Cu 25%)	1.15g (0.2875g)	0.13%
H3BO3 (B 17%)	22g (3.74g)	1.66%
Na2MoO4.2H20 (Mo 40%)	0.45g (0.18g)	0.08%
Total	225.7g

 

[ceg4048]

You do not need any more copper. As I mentioned previously, plants only require microscopic amounts of these metals. That's why they are called micro-nutrients.
Metallic ions such as Copper, Iron, Magnesium, Zinc and others are toxic as hell. Plants have to devise strategies to chelate them while they are inside their tissues and to then remove the chelation when they are needed in some molecular reaction. They are not moved around very much at all because they would need to be chelated in order to do so and chelation is an elaborate procedure and is expensive for the plant. Metals therefore accumulate within the leaf. The plant will throttle their uptake of the metals when they are unnecessary. So you can add as much as you want, but why bother, as the plant will reject them? Trace elements are much more expensive that the macronutrients, so why waste your money buying expensive products that the plant will reject?

Cheers,

 

[three-fingers]

On top of the explained redundancy of adding more copper, it's also one of the more risky to overdose for some tank inhabitants, especialy invertebrates like shrimp and snails.

As mentioned above, metals are toxic to many orgainsims in relatively low concentrations. Generally people worry too much about "overdosing" fertilisers, and you can get away with much higher doses than commonly percieved when it comes to many plant nutirents...but with copper it would be very easy to overdose and cause harm if you don't measure correctly. So if you are weighing out very small quantities of dry salts, maybe err on the side of caution more when it comes to the metal trace elements (less is safer than more, you can always add more later).