Seachem Calcium Polygluconate?

Does anybody have any experience with Calcium Polygluconate? I'm having trouble researching it on the web and I'd much appreciate some advice about it. Also, does anybody know the chemical formula? I know gluconate has 1 more oxygen than glucose, but polygluconate?

I aint heard of that stuff.

John's considering bringing in Seachem's Aquavitro line and that's the calcium supplement they have. It seems pretty sketchy to me but the other products seem alright.

"poly" just means there is more than one gluconate. Since the metal is Calcium (Ca2+) I'd bet it's 2 gluconates-- or calcium bigluconate, aka calcium bisgluconate. Anyway, the chem formula would be CaC12H22O14, since each gluconate is C6H11O7.

The problem I can see with that is, cal. gluconate isn't very soluble in water-- I think you can only get about 5-8% to really dissolve in water, and that's just plain ol' water-- not salt. Duno what it would do in a salty mixture. I use seachems Aquavitro for cal dosing, and don't have any problems whatsoever-- but then, I don't dose often because I do frequent water changes. my main complaint (and only, actually) is that it precipitates easily out of solution, leaving nasty salt crust on my hands every time I touch the bottle. But as far as I've seen it's good stuff. The gluconate just acts as food source for the critters-- it's very similar to glucose (sugar) metabolically.

Huh... what...ah.... WOW!

Many thanks, I wasn't sure if the bacteria in my tank were going to have any use for it and I didn't want some random organic molecules just kind of chilling out with my corals. One more thing, Seachem is claiming this calcium polygluconate increases the deposition rate of skeletal material in corals. Could there be any truth to that? The only thing I can think of is that gluconate plays some role in metabolism and that might have some effect on deposition?

Oh, sure, there's truth to it-- but any calcium supplement, when used right, does that. If you mean that they're claiming to have greater deposition than other calcium supplements.... enh. Maybe. I'd want to see hard data before making a call. Gluconate is definitely use in metabolism, but I don't think it'd be any more useful than any other sort of food for coral. But who knows?