Algae barn Ocean Magik inquiry

[Phantom7]

Hello! I noticed on my first and second purchase of ocean magik, the bottles smelled like rotten eggs, and i've read this is bad. since the first shipment, i've actually started my own culture and invested in a microscope. I've noticed my culture not only lacks the smell, but is more of a lighter green. I also looked at the ocean magik under my microscope, and noticed a few large clumps of what looks to be dead phyto, but there's also a few of them running around too. I estimated 75% not moving to 25% moving. With mine under the microscope, albiet definitely is a lot less dense, i don't notice these clumps of dead phyto. I'm not at all trying to bash algae barn, i'm just genuinely unexperienced with good vs bad phyto, as it's only my 2nd or so week even possessing it, and am just wonder if i'm over reacting and it's fine, or if it's a bad batch?
Here's some images, one referencing one of the clumps i was referring to, and the other comparing my (top) vs ocean magik (bottom)'s color.

 

[christwendt]

Hello! I noticed on my first and second purchase of ocean magik, the bottles smelled like rotten eggs, and i've read this is bad. since the first shipment, i've actually started my own culture and invested in a microscope. I've noticed my culture not only lacks the smell, but is more of a lighter green. I also looked at the ocean magik under my microscope, and noticed a few large clumps of what looks to be dead phyto, but there's also a few of them running around too. I estimated 75% not moving to 25% moving. With mine under the microscope, albiet definitely is a lot less dense, i don't notice these clumps of dead phyto. I'm not at all trying to bash algae barn, i'm just genuinely unexperienced with good vs bad phyto, as it's only my 2nd or so week even possessing it, and am just wonder if i'm over reacting and it's fine, or if it's a bad batch?
Here's some images, one referencing one of the clumps i was referring to, and the other comparing my (top) vs ocean magik (bottom)'s color.

View attachment 3065673 View attachment 3065674

Well few things to consider. Your phyto is superior because it’s fresh and it’s going to contain more live cells. You probably can get a denser culture too doing it at home. It will smell fresh and not stink because it’s all alive.

Disadvantage: if culturing at home unless you combine multiple strains at end of harvest you only have one strain. The algae barn has multiple strains. If you want quality phyto that isn’t grown by you order from @Eldredge. Way more superior than algae barn.

 

[taricha]

Some thoughts.
Even the bottom of my beakers of live phyto had some clumped un-moving phyto cells. If I put it in the mail and mailed it to myself, it would look worse.
This is probably unavoidable. If you want to do better than the algae barn product you can either
1) grow live phyto yourself. (it's hard, messy, time, space, and $ consuming, and you'll have way more than you can use.)
2) buy a more expensive product if you feel that you need higher nutritional quality phyto. https://reedmariculture.com/collections/instant-algae-feeds

These are preserved pastes and frozen phyto. They are made to be high nutrition for fish breeding.

But I don't think that anybody other than breeders of larvae need that level of nutritional quality. If you want to increase pod populations, then I think OceanMagik project is probably fine. Even if it's a bit stinky or only 25% (or 10%) of the algae cells are live and swimming.

My $0.02