I did a quick check of the Merck index to check on the toxic nature of this
compound. LD50 is 55 mg/kg for guinea pigs,fairly high, so you probably won't
poison yourself working with this :-) . Large amounts depresses blood cell
production just as "right" amounts stimulate as per the good doctor's post. It
is also used to make foam stabilizer in beer {thus, beer is good for intake of
vitamens :-)}, fertalizer & feed additive and for "invisible ink". The latter
comment made me think that this was one of the "safe" chemicals that they had in
those chemistry kits some of us got as young children. You might be able to
find it somewhere where they stock kids chemistry sets or perhaps it is also
sold at the feed store. Maybe some of our rural members could check it out.
As stated before it is necessary in the formation of vitamen B12. Physical
properties include a fairly high solubility. Listed in the CRC handbook of
chemistry & physics under the heptahydrate form CoCl2*6H2O a solubility of 77
grams per 100 ml which means that you can get it quite concentrated. You could
easily make it concentrated enough so that you could use drops per liter/gallon.
Looking through a couple of chemical catalogs at work it doesn't appear that it
is available strictly as CoCl2 though but only available with 6 waters. The
reason for worrying about this is if the numbers were for the compound w/o water
then the chemical that you can easily obtain (with 6 waters) should be almost
doubled as the weight difference is 1.8 x. Thus 1 mg of CoCl2 would be 1.8 mg
of CoCl2y6 H2O on the same chemical (molar) basis.
Questions for Harro (or others that might know the availability of CoCl2).
1) Did they say for sure if it was CoCl2 or CoCl2y6H2O?
2) Harro, I assume these numbers quoted were in mg per liter?
Since I have a sensitive scale available I can let our members know what the
conversion is from mass to more typical measurements that we are used to using
in the home, ie teaspoons or cc's. This could be a very easy experiment (fry
growth) that we could find the answers to within a few weeks. Anything that
could help the growth of rainbow fry would be extremely important.
Gary Lange
RSG