An Inquiry From The Press / Sealed Aquarium

[mjb]

Greetings all,

I'm a writer doing a magazine piece about a really special type of aquarium: a "sealed microcosm." I wonder if anyone here has any personal experience creating them that I could compare to my own experience and reading.

If you don't know what I mean by sealed microcosm, you can see an example of a commercial version of this idea here: http/www.eco-sphere.com/home.htm .

Basically, the idea is that you can completely bottle up a tiny aquarium, featuring very small animals such as shrimp and snails, and plants (often just algae), and the system will sustain itself with only light as input. CO2 produced by the animals is consumed by the plants, which in turn produce O2 for the animals.

The reason they're interesting is that they're an effective demonstration of ecological cycling -- not to speak of a "mini" version of the kind of biologically based life support that would be necessary for long term space flight.

These things do work, if by "work" you mean they can keep the more entertaining animals alive for months or years. I am not an experienced aquarium-keeper by any means, but I've been keeping some of these things for months and have had some animals even reproducing.

For the magazine I'd like to give readers a "recipe" that they can follow for building their own sealed microcosm, ideally using only materials obtainable at local hardware and/or fish stores. I've been building freshwater systems using shrimp and snails as the primary animals.

Has anyone on this forum ever made one of these? What was your recipe? Any experiences you'd care to relate? I would love to hear from anyone on this, whether on this forum or off (email me at mjb2000 at gmail dot com). Oh- and of course -- I'm on a deadline.

Cheers,

Martin John Brown
http/martinjohnbrown.net

 

[fishyfinger]

Greetings all,

I'm a writer doing a magazine piece about a really special type of aquarium: a "sealed microcosm." I wonder if anyone here has any personal experience creating them that I could compare to my own experience and reading.

If you don't know what I mean by sealed microcosm, you can see an example of a commercial version of this idea here: http/www.eco-sphere.com/home.htm .

Basically, the idea is that you can completely bottle up a tiny aquarium, featuring very small animals such as shrimp and snails, and plants (often just algae), and the system will sustain itself with only light as input. CO2 produced by the animals is consumed by the plants, which in turn produce O2 for the animals.

The reason they're interesting is that they're an effective demonstration of ecological cycling -- not to speak of a "mini" version of the kind of biologically based life support that would be necessary for long term space flight.

These things do work, if by "work" you mean they can keep the more entertaining animals alive for months or years. I am not an experienced aquarium-keeper by any means, but I've been keeping some of these things for months and have had some animals even reproducing.

For the magazine I'd like to give readers a "recipe" that they can follow for building their own sealed microcosm, ideally using only materials obtainable at local hardware and/or fish stores. I've been building freshwater systems using shrimp and snails as the primary animals.

Has anyone on this forum ever made one of these? What was your recipe? Any experiences you'd care to relate? I would love to hear from anyone on this, whether on this forum or off (email me at mjb2000 at gmail dot com). Oh- and of course -- I'm on a deadline.

Cheers,

Martin John Brown
http/martinjohnbrown.net

Hi
What about
1 Ammonia( harmful to occupants))
2 Nitrite ( " " " )
3 nitrate ( " " " )
water changes?
disease?
how can you sort these infrequincies out if you cannot access the vessel
If we create an enviroment we must be responsible for its inhabitants.

Perhaps if you look in the setup in the beginners section and just read about cycling a new tank
you may understand how complex it is to create a good place for things to live in.
Beginners have enough trouble trying to create this enviroment with bad advice from some poor suppliers and killing fish shrimps etc with no fault of their own.
I dont think a sealed enviroment will work.
If i were a botanist i may be able to make this sealed enviroment work.
I guess mom.dad kids would see this in a store and purchase on a Saturday afternoon.
Its only my opinion and there are a lot of more experienced people on hear than me.
I stand to be corrected.
Ian

 

[Miss Wiggle]

hmmm i've seen them and i think they look pretty cool, my guess is that the filtration is done by certain types of algae much as plants can be used as a filter as they absorb amonia nitrite and nitrate. they'd also be photosynthesising and oxygenating the water.

i wouldn't wanna attempt to DIY one though, think it would be a nightmare.

interestingly i kind of think if you were to it might be easier to do it with marine than fw, cos you could stick a lump of LR in as a filter and with the right clean up crew it's a much more self sustaining environment.

 

[mjb]

Thanks for responding fishyfinger and Miss Wiggle.

As to whether closed systems can work in concept, the answer must be yes! That's because the Earth is basically a closed system -- open to energy but pretty much sealed in terms of materials. If you think of the Earth as a tank, its water doesn't get changed! (how gross is that?) But still, life goes on.

Whether these tabletop microcosms "work" of course depends on what you consider success to be. If success is keeping your favorite inhabitants (often shrimp or some other entertaining invertebrate) alive for months or years, then they certainly can work. They are a fun little demonstration of the kind of cycles that must keep everybody on Earth alive. That's why they're a good thing for a magazine article.

The commercial system I mentioned earlier is a salt-water system, but by following this NASA-related paper you could create a freshwater one: http/janepoynter.com/documents/TheABSspa...ightresults.pdf

Nitrates and nitrites are apparently an issue. The NASA-related paper suggests that too many nutrients (notably nitrates and phosphates) can lead to algal blooms, which then consume much oxygen. For this reason one of the tricks in these things is intentionally limiting the biomass (plants, animals, debris) which is sealed up, so any available nitrates and phosphates are immediately utilized by the inhabitants. The systems are often "nitrate limited" in formal terms. Lack of nitrate and phosphate prevents algal blooms.

On the same note, most of the creatures are very small. You typically don't seal up fish (although it has been done)... it's usually just invertebrates.

I'm not sure about ammonia but some systems have apparently dealt with it, given their success in keeping the favorite inhabitants alive. I don't know what the mechanism is.

fishyfinger brings up another issue, which certainly is germane: the quality of life for the inhabitants, beyond just survival. In fact one pet shrimp enthusiast is dead set against the commercial microcosms that use Hawaiian red shrimp: http/www.petshrimp.com/hawaiianredshrimp.html , saying the microcosms are slowly starving the shrimp to death. Still, it's over 2 or 3 years, so it's quite slow.

Quality of life is something I'm concerned with, but I don't really know how to evaluate it. In the wild these plants and animals would be subject to grazing and predation; in the microcosm they're not. I guess it is true that in these systems things die, but that happens in any aquarium. In these microcosms the nutrients released on death are returned to the other plants and animals and not swept away in a tank-cleaning.

Anyway, I've rambled on. I'd love to hear any more thoughts or experiences.

Cheers!

Martin John Brown
http/martinjohnbrown.net
email: mjb2000ATgmailDOTcom

 

[raptorrex]

Hi
What about
1 Ammonia( harmful to occupants))
2 Nitrite ( " " " )
3 nitrate ( " " " )
water changes?
disease?
how can you sort these infrequincies out if you cannot access the vessel
If we create an enviroment we must be responsible for its inhabitants.

Perhaps if you look in the setup in the beginners section and just read about cycling a new tank
you may understand how complex it is to create a good place for things to live in.
Beginners have enough trouble trying to create this enviroment with bad advice from some poor suppliers and killing fish shrimps etc with no fault of their own.
I dont think a sealed enviroment will work.
If i were a botanist i may be able to make this sealed enviroment work.
I guess mom.dad kids would see this in a store and purchase on a Saturday afternoon.
Its only my opinion and there are a lot of more experienced people on hear than me.
I stand to be corrected.
Ian

oops fingers too quick there.

even with open aquarium it is possible, if the tank is well planted, for the tank to be kept with no filter at all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it happens in nature too. in Cumbria, where i come from, we have little lakes called Tarns! theses are in fact just, big, dips in the ground that have filled up with rain water, and have no other water going in or out. many years a ago some of these had fish put in, the fish live very well and some are known for their good fishing. they are self sustaining microcosms too. the only water put in is rain and the only water going out is evaporating! they are essentially stagnant, but the life that gets a foot hold allow all other things to live well too. when i said many years ago, some are said to have been there for thousands of years!

so the answer to your questions is "well what about them"? lol quite apart from anything else, these sealed microcosm do exist and do work. Err however much you think they can't

take some advice from me, when someone asks a question like this, do a web search to get a little background before you post. it may avoid a VERY red face!!!

 

[Lateral Line]

One of the biggest "enclosed systems" was Biosphere 2 which would now appear to be disfunctional.

 

[three-fingers]

If you don't know what I mean by sealed microcosm, you can see an example of a commercial version of this idea here: http/www.eco-sphere.com/home.htm .

I must REALLY impress on everyone how eco-spheres DO NOT WORK. Read HERE to find out why. They are cruel and in my opinion they should be banned, as nice as the concept is.

I once contacted(sent an email to Sales@ecospheresuk.com) the company about it and sent a link to that site. At the time i was pretty upset, so i was a bit rude (i had only just found out about the plight of the poor shrimp in those eco-spheres).

Here is my email:

http/www.petshrimp.com/hawaiianredshrimp.html

How do you guys sleep at night?

And the reply i got:

Horlicks

Found that quite funny, especially because my email was rude, but still disgusting that they know about what they are doing to these shrimp and don't even care .

fishyfinger brings up another issue, which certainly is germane: the quality of life for the inhabitants, beyond just survival. In fact one pet shrimp enthusiast is dead set against the commercial microcosms that use Hawaiian red shrimp: http/www.petshrimp.com/hawaiianredshrimp.html , saying the microcosms are slowly starving the shrimp to death. Still, it's over 2 or 3 years, so it's quite slow.

 

[mjb]

Hi Lateral Line & three-fingers, thanks for jumping in!

Lateral Line, I do know about Biosphere 2. I will talk about it in my article, and it certainly is a wacky story. I am curious -- what do you mean when you say that it is "dysfunctional"? What would they have had to do in order to "succeed"?

The reason I want to know is that the definition what makes a closed ecosystem "successful" is really key to my story.

three-fingers, I've read the web page you refer to -- since I referred to it too! Please note that I am just a reporter. I am not an advocate for those commercial ecospheres. (These, by the way, are not the only microcosms around. There are many that are homemade, and many that do not feature Hawaiian red shrimp.)

So I am very curious that someone says that the commercial ecospheres are cruel. I plan to mention this in my article. I have a similar question for you-- what do you mean when you say that the commercial ecospheres featuring Hawaiian red shrimp "do not work"? Put another way, how would a Hawaiian red shrimp's life be different in an ecosphere that DID work? What would be success?

I don't keep an aquarium, so I am not familiar with how tropical fish hobbyists feel about this, but I am also curious about what "cruelty" is when it comes to invertebrates. It seems many fish hobbyists are passionate about their fish but not so much about their snails and daphnia. In fact isn't live daphnia sold as food for some aquarium dwellers? If commercial ecospheres are cruel, then I want to put it in context.

Thank you very much for allowing me to ask such serious questions here. I really appreciate the input.

Cheers,

Martin John Brown
http/martinjohnbrown.net
email: mjb2000ATgmailDOTcom

 

[fishyfinger]

Hi
What about
1 Ammonia( harmful to occupants))
2 Nitrite ( " " " )
3 nitrate ( " " " )
water changes?
disease?
how can you sort these infrequincies out if you cannot access the vessel
If we create an enviroment we must be responsible for its inhabitants.

Perhaps if you look in the setup in the beginners section and just read about cycling a new tank
you may understand how complex it is to create a good place for things to live in.
Beginners have enough trouble trying to create this enviroment with bad advice from some poor suppliers and killing fish shrimps etc with no fault of their own.
I dont think a sealed enviroment will work.
If i were a botanist i may be able to make this sealed enviroment work.
I guess mom.dad kids would see this in a store and purchase on a Saturday afternoon.
Its only my opinion and there are a lot of more experienced people on hear than me.
I stand to be corrected.
Ian

oops fingers too quick there.

even with open aquarium it is possible, if the tank is well planted, for the tank to be kept with no filter at all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it happens in nature too. in Cumbria, where i come from, we have little lakes called Tarns! theses are in fact just, big, dips in the ground that have filled up with rain water, and have no other water going in or out. many years a ago some of these had fish put in, the fish live very well and some are known for their good fishing. they are self sustaining microcosms too. the only water put in is rain and the only water going out is evaporating! they are essentially stagnant, but the life that gets a foot hold allow all other things to live well too. when i said many years ago, some are said to have been there for thousands of years!

so the answer to your questions is "well what about them"? lol quite apart from anything else, these sealed microcosm do exist and do work. Err however much you think they can't

take some advice from me, when someone asks a question like this, do a web search to get a little background before you post. it may avoid a VERY red face!!!

Does your tarn have a lid over it? would it not be replenished with rain water, evaporate in the summer freeze in the winter. These are all changes to the enviroment that nature has become accustomed too.
Why should i have a red face. Its my opinion.

I still stand by what i say.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

Hi Lateral Line & three-fingers, thanks for jumping in!

Lateral Line, I do know about Biosphere 2. I will talk about it in my article, and it certainly is a wacky story. I am curious -- what do you mean when you say that it is "dysfunctional"? What would they have had to do in order to "succeed"?

The reason I want to know is that the definition what makes a closed ecosystem "successful" is really key to my story.

three-fingers, I've read the web page you refer to -- since I referred to it too! Please note that I am just a reporter. I am not an advocate for those commercial ecospheres. (These, by the way, are not the only microcosms around. There are many that are homemade, and many that do not feature Hawaiian red shrimp.)

So I am very curious that someone says that the commercial ecospheres are cruel. I plan to mention this in my article. I have a similar question for you-- what do you mean when you say that the commercial ecospheres featuring Hawaiian red shrimp "do not work"? Put another way, how would a Hawaiian red shrimp's life be different in an ecosphere that DID work? What would be success?

I don't keep an aquarium, so I am not familiar with how tropical fish hobbyists feel about this, but I am also curious about what "cruelty" is when it comes to invertebrates. It seems many fish hobbyists are passionate about their fish but not so much about their snails and daphnia. In fact isn't live daphnia sold as food for some aquarium dwellers? If commercial ecospheres are cruel, then I want to put it in context.

Thank you very much for allowing me to ask such serious questions here. I really appreciate the input.

Cheers,

Martin John Brown
http/martinjohnbrown.net
email: mjb2000ATgmailDOTcom

i think the best way to measure the 'success' although you probably don't have the time to do this, would be to do a controlled experiment, have an ecosphere and keep teh same creatures in a filtered lit nano tank with feeding, water changes all the care a 'standard' aquarium would get. assess the creatures daily, look at their weight, disease and lifespan. you'd probably have to do several to get an overall picture.

guessing you don't have the time, money, resources, knowledge or patience to do this, so maybe if you find some people who have kept the shrimps etc and you can get some of they're experiences to get a fuller picture of how they're life would pan out in a well maintained aquarium.

plenty of people are just as passionate about inverts as they are fish, look on the inverts section of this forum, there's a lot of passionate people. we have many tanks with shrimps and snails in, intentionally. Christ look at the planted section and you'll see how many people we have who are passionate about aquarium plants even, they might say it's cruel to them?!

yes there are 'pest' snails (so called as they would destroy things like your plants) which you may squish as a tasty treat, but many of us will put malaysian trumpet snails into our tanks as they are helpful in stirring your sand and keeping the tank healthy.

As for feeding, you can't say just cos people feed they're fish daphnia they don't care about inverts, plenty of people also breed livebearers to give as a treat to they're other fish. other people keep livebearers as they're fish of choice. You can buy 'feeder' guppies and goldifsh etc in many stores. It's natural and healthy for fish to have some meat and protein in they're diets, inevitably some of this will come from other animals. For most community fish it's mroe natural for them to eat daphnia than other fish, so that's what is most available commercially, but don't think it's the only live food available or it's just inverts *we* could see as food.

and don't thank us, it's nice to have a decent discussion like this

 

[catxx]

The reason I don't like those closed ecosystems is because they're a fashionable fad. What if the buyer doesn't want it 2 years down the line? In the bin it goes to get crushed up by the bin men. Or given to their kids to "experiment" with.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

The reason I don't like those closed ecosystems is because they're a fashionable fad. What if the buyer doesn't want it 2 years down the line? In the bin it goes to get crushed up by the bin men. Or given to their kids to "experiment" with.

no worse than how thousands of clown fish have no doubt been bought and treated post finding nemo

sadly anything that attracts people to the hobby will also attract people who will get bored of it and mistreat the fish

 

[CruX]

The reason I don't like those closed ecosystems is because they're a fashionable fad. What if the buyer doesn't want it 2 years down the line? In the bin it goes to get crushed up by the bin men. Or given to their kids to "experiment" with.

no worse than how thousands of clown fish have no doubt been bought and treated post finding nemo

sadly anything that attracts people to the hobby will also attract people who will get bored of it and mistreat the fish

You just reminded me of a discovery I made at work about 18 months ago. My job sometimes involves having to go into peoples homes. At the time I wasn't keeping fish but I had kept fish in the past and often helped out with my Mother and Step-Fathers three tanks so I knew a little bit about fish. I discovered a clown fish belly up in someones goldfish tank. I remember saying at the time to the woman who was just sticking the Nemo DVD on for her daughter that somehow a marine fish had found its way into her coldwater-freshwater tank, she wouldn't have it that it made any odds as 'fish breathe water, don't they?'

 

[PaulasPets]

Put another way, how would a Hawaiian red shrimp's life be different in an ecosphere that DID work?

The linked site states that the shrimp shrink. If the ecosphere did work, I guess the shrimp should be growing and reproducing.
The theory on the system is very simple, but to make it work in real life will just not work. The space is too small for it to work. If you would make the whole thing bigger it still won't work, although it might seem like it works, but that is just because you have a bigger buffer.

Lets say we try a 100 gallon tank, put some shrimp in there, some plants, some algae and some bacteria. All could be living in there for years, the shrimp family may even survive for several generations. Then one day a few shrimp get sick and die, their dead bodies rotting away cauing the water parameters to be out of range for the other shrimp and they also die.

Make it even bigger: biosphere2. It failed because this type of thing just doesn't work.

So, want to go even bigger then biosphere? Earth... this too doesn't work, yes it seems like its working, but in the long run all life on earth as we know it will die. The advantage we have on earth is that since it is so increadibly big, the buffer is huge making it work for a very long time. Long enough even for species to evolve and adapt to changing conditions.

Could it ever work? I think it could, but we need to learn a lot more about what life is and how it exactly works... The system is based on some simple principles, like:
plants: use water and CO2 to produce oxygen and plant mass
animals: use plant mass and oxygen to create CO2 and ammonia
bacteria: use ammonia to create nitrite, to create nitrate, to create nitrogen

these are all very simple principles know to exist in our aquariums, but there are far more complex transitions between ellements taking place, many of which we don't understand or even know about. So unless fully understanding every transition of ellements we can not create a closed system that stays alive.

So, NASA has been researching this for quite a while, to use on deepspace travels or to keep people alive on mars or the moon. I don't see this happen, even if they can make it work, I think that the ecosphere needed to keep a few people alive for an extended period of time would have to be way to big to incorporate into a spaceship. It would be easier to mount a couple of big rockets to the north and south pole and just take the earth for a spin into deep space

But there is another way. Everything we know is made up out of 3 basic elements: protons, nutrons and electrons. If we can take these apart and recompile in any way we want, we can literally turn a pile of #### into a gold bar or anything we want. Sounds too good to be true now, but one day this will probably be possible and we will have replicators like they have on Star Trek...

Paula

 

[Lateral Line]

Lateral Line, I do know about Biosphere 2. I will talk about it in my article, and it certainly is a wacky story. I am curious -- what do you mean when you say that it is "dysfunctional"? What would they have had to do in order to "succeed"?

My comment about it being dysfunctional was not a comment on the success or failure of the biosphere whilst operating, (although I do believe they had problems - it was a research initiative after all). More, it was prompted by the comment at Wikipedia that said that the biosphere was no longer sealed.

On the home site for the project, you can now sign up for tours of the facility, which implies even more strongly that the experiment must be over since this would not be possible with a sealed environ.

The planet is probably the best example of a closed system we have. True, there is a small continuous exchange of material with solar system and interstellar material entering the atmosphere and volatiles leaving it. Not to mention, the amount of hardware we are removing from the planet with our space activities. All of these things amount to small fractions of a percent however.

It is true that all life on Earth is ultimately doomed as the Sun evolves, however, in a true "closed system thought experiment" the constancy of the energy source would be assumed. Taken to extremes, we can not be sure of the fate of the universe, thus any physical "closed system" within it has an uncertain future.

Then one day a few shrimp get sick and die

Simply as a devils advocate here, old age/death and recycling of the components of the body is part of the cycle. With the correct bacterial mix in the system, I would expect a large enough tank to have the buffering capacity to cope with the extra load of a dead shrimp. As for disease wiping out a load of them at once pushing the system out of balance, yes, but one could question the origin of the disease. In a well constructed experiment, the disease pathogens would not have entered the setup.

plants: use water and CO2 to produce oxygen and plant mass
animals: use plant mass and oxygen to create CO2 and ammonia
bacteria: use ammonia to create nitrite, to create nitrate, to create nitrogen

The final step, nitrate->Nitrogen is anærobic and not neede. The plan6ts use nitrate as their nitrogen source for protein synthesis.