Ecosphere (aquarium)

[1][2] The EcoSphere's main visual appeal is provided by tiny red-pink shrimp, Halocaridina rubra, between 1/4 and 3/8 inch (or approximately a centimeter) in length.

The shrimp swim energetically around the aquarium, eat the brown bacterial and algal scum on the glass, consume the filamentous green algae which sometimes forms a globular pillow in the water, and perch on a fragment of soft coral.

The main conceptual interest of these objects lies in the fact that they are materially closed ecological systems which are self-sustaining over a period of years.

[4] On July 15, 1982, Joe Hanson of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, held a workshop on "Closed Ecosystems".

It is possible to purchase Halocaridina shrimp from Hawaiian aquarium dealers and create home-made sealed aquaria with no other special supplies.

Sand, gravel, crushed shell, and very well cycled filtered water from a successful saltwater aquarium, with the lowest attainable ammonia content, should be used.

The advantage of an aquarium closed with a lid (rather than a permanently sealed plug, which is found in the base of an EcoSphere) is that if the system goes out of equilibrium, the owner can remedy conditions and prevent a complete die-off.

Kept indoors at room temperatures, with exposure to sunlight from a window, such systems have been found to contain living organisms even after several decades.

Make magazine Volume 10 contained instructions for creating a self-contained fresh-water "biosphere", which contained a freshwater amano shrimp, snails, amphipods, ostracods, copepods, rigid hornwort, duckweed, pond scum (for microorganisms), and small rocks or shells (as a pH buffer).

[11] In their paper "The Emergence of Materially-closed-system Ecology", Joe Hanson and Clair Folsome discussed the creation of Ecosphere-like closed ecosystems.

They talked about how they were going to make vibrating eggs but they took a different route.In the paper Hanson stated that the composition of the closed ecosystems he created was 50% distilled water brought to a salinity of 11 parts per thousand by the addition of "Instant Ocean", 50% air, algae collected from the ponds of Halocaridina rubra shrimp (and their associated microbial populations), and 3 to 16 Halocaridina rubra shrimp (and their associated microbial populations).