A Self sustainable Tank

spiff44

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Sure. Check out things like this: http://www.eco-sphere.com/ to work right it takes a huge volume per organism... even for the microscopic ones. If you want to scale up with fish, it would have to be gigantic.
 

mudbuttjones

Fire Eel
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Jul 29, 2014
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I went to a fish store once that had a huge planted tank, over 100g with just a single Male betta fish in it. they probably never needed water changes but who knows if they fertilized the plants or fed the fish. Im thinking that kind of stocking ratio would be around where a self sufficient tank would have to be.


I remember reading an article online about a guy who sealed off a large aquarium for the better part of a year. It was full of adult live bearers (platties or mollies I think) they fry were part of the food chain. (Cannibalism?) Also had some ottos and shrimp among other things.


Even wild ecosystems arent totally "self sufficient". Most bodies of water are river or spring fed and have an endless supply of cleaner water.

Salt water aquarium guys get pretty crazy with this stuff and do more topoffs than waterchanges. But there is alot of microbiology going on. Like plankton / copeopods and stuff like that. Im sure there has to be a freshwater equivalent to that. Like daphnia /hydra or something
 

Pomatomus

Piranha
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Having owned an eco-sphere for 3 years I'm sure it's possible to an extent. However, what you need to remember is that the conservation of matter is important within a closed system. Therefore, you need a very complete ecosystem to sustain one for a while. There needs to be enough total nutrients and minerals in the system to grow the inhabitant to its full potential. You also need to foster a culture of denitrifying bacteria to keep nitrates down and alkalinity up. If you don't have denitrification going on, then your nitrates will climb, your pH will fall, and you will get "old tank syndrome" and ammonia will rapidly accumulate.

Keep in mind that the organisms in your system can't accumulate biomass (for very long) without the addition of organics to the system. Take aquaponics for example: you have fish and plants growing in the same system. Often, some of these plants are fed back to the fish. However, you can't expect to just pull plant and animal biomass out indefinitely so the fish are fed other things such as pellets or insects (depending on region and availability). So you can't expect fish and plants to keep growing in a closed system unless there is an additional input of nutrients. The goal is mostly to maintain biomass equilibrium, with the plants and animals maintaining a typical weight. That's one of the reasons you never see these ecospheres with young fish. They try to reach equilibrium with an adult animal that doesn't need to assimilate as many nutrients into biomass.
 

justarn

Arapaima
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May 24, 2011
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Sure. Check out things like this: http://www.eco-sphere.com/ to work right it takes a huge volume per organism... even for the microscopic ones. If you want to scale up with fish, it would have to be gigantic.
they are cool spiff, can you not get access to prolong it? also does it not get clouded out by algae.
 

spiff44

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they are cool spiff, can you not get access to prolong it? also does it not get clouded out by algae.

I'm not sure.. but presumably its a very tuned system... just the right amount of algae and other tiny organisms to feed each other... it would be interesing to see if you could crash this closed system... like maybe a lot of direct sunlight and get an algae explosion like you're talking about.

I would be concerned at that point of gas buildup.. if it really is sealed with no way to offgas.. and presuming its pretty thin glass, it could explode.
 

Yodins

Feeder Fish
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Aug 29, 2014
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Can someone please post pics of these self sustaining tanks? Definitely interested in this now

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