Chapter 39 8.1 Life in a sealed bottle

At the end of a long row of exhibits at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, a cluster of dense coral reefs grows happily under the light.Behind the glass walls of the aquarium, a few feet of self-contained space gathers the diverse life of a mile-long coral reef under the South Pacific Ocean. This condensed reef creates a New Age musical atmosphere with its exotic hues and eerie life forms.Standing in front of this rectangular container is like stepping on a harmonious node.There are more species of life per square meter than anywhere else on Earth.Life is too dense.The unusually rich natural coral reef has been further compressed into an artificial barrier reef that exceeds the natural enrichment level.

Two plate glass windows give you a glimpse of Alice in Wonderland teeming with exotic creatures.Hippie-colored fish stare at orange-and-white-striped clownfish, or at a school of bright blue damselfish.These flamboyant little elves sometimes swim swiftly among the feathery tentacles of sorrel soft corals, and sometimes shuttle between the slow-moving fat lips of giant sea clams. For these creatures, this is not just a pen, it is their home.They want to eat, sleep, play, and breed here until the end of their lives.Not only that, but given enough time, they will co-evolve and share their destiny.What they have is a real community of life.

Behind this coral display tank, a rumbling mass of pumps, pipes and various mechanisms, powered by electricity, maintains the super-biological diversity of this toy reef.A tourist, opening an unmarked door, trudged from the aquarium's dimly lit viewing room to the pump, and a blinding, alien-like flood of light poured out as soon as the door opened.The interior of the room here is painted white, filled with warm steam, and the dazzling lights are suffocating.Overhead racks hang fiery metal-halide lamps that radiate 15 hours of tropical sunlight each day.Salt water surges through a four-ton cement vat filled with wet sand laden with decontaminating bacteria.Under artificial sunlight, green algae thrive in long shallow plastic trays, filtering natural toxins from the reef waters.

For this reef, industrial plumbing replaces the Pacific Ocean.Sixteen thousand gallons of regenerated seawater swirls through the biomimetic system, washing over the reef, bringing filtered, turbulent water the same way miles of seaweed gardens and sandy beaches in the South Pacific provide to wild reefs. , Oxygen-rich seawater.This whole set of charged displays is a delicate, fragile, hard-won balance that requires energy and care every day.One wrong step and an entire reef can fall apart in a day. The ancients knew that what can be destroyed in a day may take years or even centuries to build.Before Steinhart Reef was built, no one was sure whether reef colonies could be created artificially, or if so, how long such a job would take.Marine scientists are well aware that, as complex ecosystems, coral reefs must be assembled in the right order to be successful.But no one knows exactly what that order is.Apparently, marine biologist Lloyd Gomez had no idea what that order was when he first wandered around the dank basement of the college's aquarium building.Gomez dumped buckets of microbes into large plastic tanks and stirred them up, adding each species one by one in a different order, hoping to get a formed community.But basically every attempt is a failure.

He begins each attempt by growing a thick, bean-colored seaweed culture, which he discharges in the midday sun, bubbling messily.Gomez flushes the tanks if the system starts to deviate from conditions that form a coral reef.It took less than a year, and he finally obtained the prototype coral culture fluid with the correct evolution direction. Creating nature takes time.Five years after Gomez started the reef, the reef did not become a self-sustaining system.Until recently, Gomez had to feed the fish and invertebrates that inhabit the artificial reef.But in his view, the reef is now mature. "After 5 years of intensive care, I have established a complete food web for the aquarium, so I don't have to feed it anymore." The only thing to provide is sunlight, and the halogen energy is constantly burned to generate artificial sunlight. poured over this artificial reef.Sunlight feeds the algae, the algae feeds the aquatic life, and the aquatic life feeds the corals, sponges, clams, and fish.Ultimately, the reef is powered by electricity.

Gomez predicts further shifts will occur when the reef community finally stabilizes. "In my opinion, it's going to change significantly until it's about 10 years old. Because at that point the reef will coalesce. The pedestal corals will start to root down into the loose rock, and the sponges that are in the ground will be at the bottom. Burrowing. All of these will integrate into one large group of life." A living rock develops from a few seed organisms. Everyone did not expect that among all the creatures that melted into this toy reef, about 90% of the creatures sneaked in, that is to say, there were no shadows of them in the initial pot of culture fluid.In fact, there were a small amount of completely invisible microorganisms in the culture fluid at the beginning, but it was not until five years later, when the reef was ready for fusion, that the conditions for these microorganisms to participate in the fusion development were met, and in the Until then, they had been floating stealthily and patiently.

At the same time, some of the species that dominated the reef in the initial stages disappeared.'I didn't expect that to happen,' Gomez said.This was a total shock to me.Creatures die one after another.I ask myself what am I doing wrong?It turns out I did nothing wrong.It's just the cycle of the colony.This colony needs a lot of microalgae to start.Within 10 months afterward, the microalgae disappeared.Then, some of the sponges that started off vigorously disappeared, and another kind of sponge popped up.Just recently, a type of black sponge began to take root in the reef.And I have absolutely no idea where it came from.As with Packard's prairie restoration efforts and Wingate's Nansatchee Island restoration efforts, coral reefs need the help of some companion species in the initial stages of assembly, not in maintenance.Some parts of the reef are little more than "thumbs".

This reef-building technique by Lloyd Gomez was a hit at night school.Coral reefs are the latest challenge for the persistent amateur.These people enroll in school to learn how to shrink the vastness of the ocean to 100 gallons.Gomez's miniature saltwater system collects creatures from miles around into a large aquarium with accessories.Accessories are dosing pumps, halogen lamps, ozone generators, molecular adsorption filters, things like that.At $15,000 per aquarium, that's a lot of money.This expensive equipment works like a real ocean, cleaning and filtering the water around the reef.Coral habitats require a very delicate balance of water-soluble gases, trace chemical elements, pH, microbial populations, light, wave patterns, and temperature.And all of this is provided in the aquarium by an interconnected network of mechanical devices and biological agents.A common mistake, according to Gomez, is trying to cram more organisms into habitats than the system can handle, or, as Pym and Drake discovered, not introducing them in the correct order.So how much does order really matter?In Gomez's words: "It's a matter of life and death."

To obtain a stable reef, it is important to have the initial microbial matrix in place.Claire Folsom, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaii, once concluded from his studies of microbial cultures in jars: "The basis of any stable closed ecosystem is basically Some kind of microorganism.” He believes that in any ecosystem, microorganisms are responsible for “closing the ring of biological elements” and enabling the circulation of atmosphere and nutrients.For this, he found evidence in the random mixing of microbes.Folsom's experiments were very similar to those of Pym and Drake, the only difference being that he put the lids on the jars.What he imitates is not a small part of life on earth, but the self-sufficient self-circulation system of the entire earth.All matter on Earth is in some sort of cycle (except for a little insignificant escape of light gases, and a few falling meteorites).In the terms of systems science, the earth is physically a closed system.On the other hand, Earth is open from an energy/information perspective: the sun shines on it, and information comes and goes.Like Earth, Folsom's jar is physically closed and energetically open.He dug up samples of salty microbes from the bays of the Hawaiian Islands, funneled them into lab-style glass one- and two-liter flasks, sealed them, and measured them by drawing a small amount through a sampling port. population ratios and energy flows until they stabilize.

Folsom was as surprised as Pym was when he discovered how easily random mixtures could form self-organizing ecosystems.He was surprised to find that even the added challenge of creating a closed nutrient loop in a sealed flask did not prevent simple microbial communities from achieving equilibrium.Folsom said that in the fall of 1983, he and another researcher named Cao Hengxin realized that closed ecosystems, "even if they have a small number of species, can almost survive." Some of Ersom's original flasks have survived for 15 years.The earliest bottle was packaged in 1968, which is 25 years old now.During this time, no air, food or nutrients were added to it.Still, his bottle, and all the other bottled biomes, thrived for many years thereafter with just ample indoor light.

However, no matter how long they survive, these bottling systems require a start-up phase, a period of fluctuating danger that lasts about 60 to 100 days, during which any accidents can happen.Gomez sees the same thing in his coral microbes: the beginnings of complexity rooted in chaos.However, if complex systems can achieve a common equilibrium after a period of mutual accommodation, then nothing can derail it afterwards. How long can this closed complex system run?Folsom said that it was the legend of a cactus enclosed in a glass jar in 1895 exhibited in the National Museum of Paris that inspired his initial interest in creating a closed physical world.He couldn't confirm the legend, but it's said that over the past century, the algae and moss covering the cactus have cycled through the colors from green to yellow in sequence.If the closed glass jar can get light and a stable temperature, then, in theory, there is no reason why the moss can't survive the sun's destruction. Folsom's enclosed microbial mini-worlds have their own rhythms of life that truly mirror those of our planet.Over a period of about two years, they recycle their carbon, from carbon dioxide to organic matter, and from organic matter to carbon dioxide, and so on.They maintain a biological productivity similar to that of the outside ecosystem.They produce rations of oxygen that are slightly higher than Earth's oxygen levels.Their energy efficiency is comparable to that of external large ecosystems.Moreover, there is apparently no limit to the number of organisms they support. From his own world of flasks, Folsom concluded that microbes—microscopic life made of tiny cells, not sequoias, crickets, or orangutans—respired the most, producing the air, Ultimately feeding an infinity of visible life on Earth.The invisible microbial matrix guides the development of life as a whole and fuses together various nutrient loops.Folsom feels that the creatures that command our attention, those that require our care, may be merely ornamental, ornamental, as far as the environment is concerned.It's the microbes in the guts of mammals, and the ones that cling to tree roots, that make trees and mammals valuable in closed systems, including Earth.