The current issue of Make Magazine (vol. 10) has instructions for making your own tabletop biosphere! (I believe this post is one that Bridget and Jen W. would classify as "Geek Alert"-worthy.) I'm intrigued - I may give it a try. The best idea that Make can offer for sealing the biosphere is to use a Bell jar with a gasket, which isn't a great seal, but might do for a short-lived ecosystem. I've long desired one of the fancy 9" handblown glass globe
Ecospheres, but at $400+ a pop, I think I'll have to keep on desiring. But those sealed glass ecosystems can live more than a decade, with reportedly less than a 5% failure rate for the larger ones. Amazing.
Anyway, to quote Make:
There's never been another world like [the one you'll be creating.] In a way, you're God! Which might bring on some curious emotions if something goes awry. Multispecies assemblages are never 100% reliable. Your econaut may die mysteriously. Or you might observe signs of stress: shrimp that molt and then shrink instead of grow, or carnivory among normally-vegetarian shrimp or snails. Hard questions arise. Was it right to start this world? Will you intervene, or abandon your creations to a sealed fate?
Maybe I'll give it a try!
2 comments:
I'd like to just say that Jen started the geek alert. I just second it.
Not for this though--it sounds really cool. How long does a biosphere live?
Theoretically, indefinitely. But that would require reproduction to occur, which is a bit ambitious for a self-contained table-top world. I'd expect a homemade one to be doing great if it were going for a few years - you'd have to get lucky with healthy animals, the right balance of flora to fauna, etc.
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