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Avoid adding seaweed fertilizers

    I think I am emerging from my denial phase regarding the death of my 
loaches and coming to grips with my bad judgment.  This little indiscretion 
I am about to describe has caused the death of many old loaches.  While I 
am a plant nut, my fish of choice are loaches and I have been keeping them 
together for years.  I'll admit the relationship is imperfect, the loaches 
seem to get the better half of the stick.  I mean the plants uptake of fish 
waste and have provided the fish with an excellent environment for 
years.  Along with that clean water, my swords provided, the loaches 
specifically, with hours of leaf popping fun.  Anyway, this aquatic 
playground all came crashing down one day this past summer ('00) when I 
screwed up.  While I was outside tending to the gardens I had an idea.  I 
had thought of this on a few occasions before, but discounted it for the 
fear of the unknown.  I had a nice bottle of organic "wonder potion" that 
will revive the most pathetic of plants.  If it's so good on the stuff in 
my yard why not try a little on the plants in the tank!   Damn if I hadn't 
talked myself out of this the few times in the past, but in the moment of 
weakness or daring, I went for it.  The solution was an organic form of 
trace elements, an elixer of sorts, the extract of kelp.  Hell, take a ton 
of kelp, make a kelp tea and then reduce it to a concentrate, what a good 
booster for the common house plant. Add a teaspoon of this liquid plant 
life to a 90 gal plant tank, and well, it was certain death for my 
loaches.  Within a day or two they ALL developed Ick!  Now I am sure there 
are a few of you here shaking your heads saying, of course it does.  If I 
had erred on the side of caution like I had done so many times in the past, 
I too would be shaking my head today listening to this from someone 
else.  But this time I did it, and there is the stress indicator!  I 
quickly did water changes, added carbon and did more changes.  I feed them 
medicated foods, and did more water changes, but to no avail, they are all 
gone, Clows, Botia rostrata, and B. striata.  Surprisingly enough, through 
all this pain, not a lick of stress in the other fish.   I have a 4 year 
old Farlowella no issue, a trio of panda cory, still spawning to this day 
even the ottos are fine.  There are two bristle nose plecos, a plekolota, 
an angelfish, and a 3 year old hummingbird tetra that all made it through 
this onslaught of heavy metals.  I did however loose 2 of my 4 year old 
SEAs while one of them managed to survive.  I was surprised at what 
happened and then again I was annoyed that I could be so stupid.  I am 
writing this to get it into the archives, that it is a bad idea to add 
Liquid Kelp Concentrates to your plant tanks if you have fish in 
there.  Without a little more research into the root cause I will place 
this very high on the "never do" list.  During all that death, I paid 
little attention to the health of my plants.  I never noticed any 
appreciable improvement, and I know they look none the worse for ware.  I 
would say that, understanding loaches to be a particularly sensitive 
species, if the application of kelp stressed them to the point of ick, then 
I am sure it was a load on the other fish as well.  It has been said that 
Botia are sensitive to Copper and I know there is Cu in the elixer, maybe 
that was at to high of a level for them.  Maybe it was Cu and another 
metal, maybe it's a bunch of them I am unsure.  I am relatively confident 
that the kelp was the primary environmental change that brought on the 
ick.  My water parameters all were within normal ranges, and the 
temperature stable, also my pressurized CO2 setup was producing with normal 
parameter.  I am not going to try it again in an attempt to disprove my 
supposition, but anyone else is welcome to prove me wrong:)  I will stick 
to my normal PMDD mix and leave the kelp for outdoor use.

  Thanks for listening,
  Jeff(JD)