Comments on Diatomaceuos Earth

I wanted to post some of my past comments and thoughts on Diatomaceous Earth and mixing it in with your chicken's feed:

Diatoms are are single-celled algae that do indeed inhabit the oceans and freshwater lakes. They are especially efficient in removing silica (SiO2)from seawater to make their shells, which are an amorphous from of silica similar to opal in crystalline structure. Some have made the claim that diatoms are responsible for putting 70% of the oxygen in our atmosphere as they are plants absorbing CO2 and releasing O2. Single-celled animals called "radiolarians" and some kinds of sponges secrete silica too. When diatoms and radiolarians die, they sink to the bottom of the sea (or lake) and accumilate in the sediment. Under areas of high biological productivity, where silica-secreting organisms are abundant, because of a high supply of silica & other nutrients in the water (from eroding rocks on land enriched in silica e.g. granites, rhyolites, etc), the silica shells of dead organisms rain down and form silica -rich "diatom ooze" (DE) and "radiolarian ooze." When these oozes become cemented and hardened into rock, they are called "diatomite" and "radiolarite." One of the best known diatomites is the Monterey Formation which is exposed along coastal regions of central and southern California. Many ancient cherts, silica rich rocks, originated in coastal waters rich in silica. Quartz is the mineral name for silica. Minerals. of course make up rocks. Other one-celled (and multi-cell)organisms make their shells of Calcium carbonate (CaCO3)--sea shells the mineral is called calcite (or aragonite as in a diffrent structure), the rock is called limestone (carbonates). I don't see any difference in eating quartz sand than eating diatamaceous earth-- it is all quartz. When I was in grad school in geology at the Univ of Missouri-Columbia, I complained to another student about him grinding up beautiful, large quartz crystals for his Master's thesis to study the coatings. He replied, "Chris, the whole ****ing crust of the world is composed of quartz (silica), get over it!" I can see why it is good for a chicken to eat quartz (serves the function of grit) as it has a hardness factor of 7 on Moh's mineral hardness scale (for reference diamond is hardest at 10 and talc is softest at 1; calcite is 3)-- quartz gives granite its hardness and takes millions of years to dissolve (my professor said 7 million years for a grain) & that's why the beaches are (in most places) more white-- everything else is dissolved except the quartz! BUT WHY WOULD A PERSON EAT QUARTZ? Eating quartz sand would be pretty much the same! Our bones (and a dog's bones) are made of Calcium phosphate (the mineral is "apatite" (Ca5PO4) -- Moh's hardness is a 5 for apatite). I give my chickens very fine (play) white quartz sand-- same thing- to play in and eat-- any difference??? (Sorry, not trying to offend anyone). There are other minerals in DE but very fine sand mixed with a little dirt (but much more quartz beach sand than the dirt) would be similar. I am no longer a geologist(micropaleaontology was my specialty--microscopic fossils like diatoms, conodonts, forams, radiolarians) though later, i went to law school and do that now. Again, please take no offense-- just informing-- again, why would anyone eat silica daily or feed it to your dog daily? It is silica rich dirt, tiny quartz? Chickens/birds yes, people/dogs, no.

And my comments on DE as a de-wormer:

If your chickens already have worms, DE is not going to get rid of them. You are going to have to use a dewormer. DE is not the cure all, end-all. DE likely improves your chicken's digestion and nutrient uptake. This would aid their general health and vigor.

You need to use a food grade DE. I use in the feed: http://www.biconet.com/pets/fossilShell.html

There is also a difference for somebody who resides with their chickens in the arid, dry Southwest U.S. and not in the humid Eastern or Southeastern U.S.Parasites, worms (and their intermediate hosts), mosquitos and bugs of all sorts take on a different meaning in more hot & humid climates and are more difficult to keep in check. It is a completely different environment in humid, hot regions. SW cacti don't grow well here in Alabama either.

As Damerow points out in Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, Deworming:

/QUOTE: "If you prefer to avoid drug use, sooner or later someone will tell you that the best way to keep chickens free of worms is to feed them diatamaceous earth- diatom fossils ground into an abrasive powder that shreds delicate bodies. I have never seen evidence that diatamaceous earth is an effective dewormer, and common sense tells me it couldn't be. When diatamaceous earth gets wet (as it would inside a chicken's digestive tract), it softens and loses its cutting edge. /The best way to control worms is to provide good sanitation and control intermediate hosts."

I agree with Damerow about DE NOT being a "dewormer." However, she should have stopped right there and not added her common sense analysis because she is not a geologist. I disagree with her "common sense" analysis completely. Damerow must not know that diatoms make their shells out of quartz.

It takes a grain of quartz about 6 million years to dissolve. This is why most beaches which are located far from their eroding sources are made up almost entirely of white, quartz sand. Getting wet or a chicken's digestive process are not going to have ANY effect on a diatom shell's abrasive qualities. Wet DE that becomes crystallized becomes the very resistant rock called "chert."

In "The Chicken Health Handbook," Damerow states,

QUOTE: "Controlling parasitic worms requires good management rather than constant medication . . . Good management involves these . . . measures:(1) practice good sanitation; (2) eliminate intermediate hosts; (3) rotate the range of free range birds; (4) avoid mixing chickens of different ages and (5) don't raise turkeys with chickens."

Damerow also observes: QUOTE: "Under good management, worms and chickens become balanced in peaceful co-existence. Through gradual exposure, birds can develop resistance to most parasites. An overload is usually caused by disease or stress. . . A healthy chicken can tolerate a certain amount of parasitic invasion."

If your birds have poultry lice, this could be causing the stress making them vulnerable to the parasitic worms. I would treat for the mites dusting each bird with Poultry Dust or equivalent:http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/product/insectrin_dust.html This is available at my feed store. Follow the directions on the Poultry Dusts' label for treating infested birds. I use it preventably by mixing it in the dust baths of my chickens every few weeks or so.There are two main groups of worms: round ones and flat ones. There are two subgroups of the round ones: roundworms & thorny-headed worms. You should treat your chickens with a wormer like piperazine or any other approved for round worms.

More of my thoughts on DE:

I do not believe that DE getting wet affects it one iota. DE starts out wet on the deep ocean floor where it is scooped up. Also, silica (quartz) is very HARD and RESISTANT. Almost nothing cuts it. Oh sure, some of the little spines might get broke long before it is even scooped up, but diatoms are microscopic, so tiny, it would be like asking, "Does quartz sand dissolve or break when it gets wet?" (and sand isn't so tiny, you can see it with your naked eye). That is an obvious "no." I can also tell you that in the 1960s, a major toothpaste company started putting ground "pumice" in their toothpaste. Pumice is simply a silica rich lava that solidifies while being blown through the air at high speed from a volcano. Well, the pumice toothpaste was "tearing" up teeth, grinding them to nothing, so the company had to remove it immediately from their toothpaste. So, silica on a brush, wet and brushed against a person's teeth, the QUARTZ (pumice, DE, sand) WON! The pumice ddidn't break!

On another note, my microscopic conodonts, which like I said are made "apatite"(your teeth) and much softer tha quartz, would be extracted from a pound of limestone by me as follows: (1) using a rock grinder to grind up the limestone into a powder; (2) this powder placed in a bucket of pure acetic acid for about a month to dissolve it; (3) the residue then put through a sieve & shook real good; (4) that residue put in a heavy, poisonous liquid (tetra bromiethane) for particle separation and then (5) the remaining residue run through a heavy machine with a magnet to take out the iron particles. After all this, what I was left with after starting with a pound of limestone would be a little, very small mound of particles that would fit completely in the palm of your hand, maybe a tablespoon. In this little mound, I would pick out the microscopic conodonts under a binocular scope. The conodont fossils would be whole, mostly not broken and pristine and sharp (with little exception). This is with a microfossil about 350 million years old, died long, long ago, deposited on the sea floor, dried & hardened into rock then pushed up into a Mountain of Himilayan size with all that heat and tectonic force of continents colliding, volcanic heat all around (an island arc like Japan)and then here I am, 350 years later, breaking it out of the side of hill in Arkansas with my rock hammer, putting it a bag, driving back to Columbia, Missouri doing all those things (above) to it, still UNBROKEN, only apatite, not quartz! See my point?!

That being said, parasitic worms have evolved with birds to inhabit in them, live ingested in them through their life cycles over milions of years. They are very hardy and persistent. I do not think DE, sand or pumice being ingested by a bird is going to kill them by "shredding" them as some claim. I do believe that the DE aids the bird in digestion of their food and more nutrients get absorbed improving the bird's overall health. This overall healthy bird can be more in balance with the worms in its environment. This is why I use DE. If my birds get worms, then I will treat with medicine. I do not believe in treating them with medicines unless they have a problem.