The Good Gift Guide
Ecosphere
The World that Came in the Mail
Invented by NASA Scientists, The Ecosphere is the Worlds first totally enclosed Ecosystem - a complete, self contained and self sustaining miniature world encased in glass. It is simply incredible.
Each EcoSphere is a completely sealed ecosystem. It contains active micro-organisms - thats red shrimp and algae to you and me - in a clear ‘soup’ of filtered sea-water. Simply provide the EcoSphere with indirect natural or artificial light and the ecosystem will thrive without needing further attention. EcoSpheres have a life expectancy of two to three years but it is not uncommon for a system to last much longer – some have continued for over 10 years.
The Small Ecosphere comes in either a round or oval design. The Small Round is the most popular EcoSphere containing 3 shrimp and a hand cut piece of Gorgonia, whilst the Oval is identical in content to the small round with 3 shrimp, but a taller, leaner shape – it’s just a matter of personal preference which shape is more attractive. Please make your selection from the box below.
Space Age Technology
The EcoSphere is the result of technology developed at NASA’s research laboratories. NASA scientists were researching self-contained communities for space explorers to live in during long-term space flights. And out of this work came the EcoSphere – an ecosystem of animal and plant life in perfect balance with nature.
What is an EcoSphere?
An EcoSphere is a working ecological system and its biological cycle represents a simple version of Earth’s own ecosystem. While beautiful to look at, it demonstrates the delicate balance of a closed system like the Earth and contains some of the same essential elements that are found on our planet. The Earth is represented by the gravel at the bottom, with water filling approximately two-thirds of the system and air filling the balance of the space. Fire is represented by the light. And finally to complete the system, life – the shrimp, the algae and the bacteria.
Who developed EcoSpheres?
Originally discovered by two scientists, the EcoSphere is the result of technology developed at NASA’s research laboratories. NASA scientists were researching self-contained communities for space explorers to live in during long-term space flights. And out of this work came the EcoSphere – an ecosystem of animal and plant life in perfect balance with nature. The EcoSphere is a NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technology Transfer Program.
What's inside an EcoSphere?
Each system comprises a clear ‘soup’ of filtered seawater containing gravel and gorgonia (the non-living branch like material) together with some shrimp, algae and bacteria. Each is a key component of the ecosystem. The gravel, gorgonia and glass all provide surface areas to which the micro-organisms can attach themselves.
How does it work?
The EcoSphere works by gathering energy from the light and converting it biochemically. Light, together with the carbon dioxide in the water, enables the algae to produce oxygen by photosynthesis. The shrimp breathe the oxygen in the water and graze on the algae and the bacteria. The waste from the shrimp is broken down by the bacteria into nutrients, which in turn feed the algae. The shrimp and the bacteria also give off carbon dioxide and the cycle is renewed when the algae use this once again to produce oxygen.
How Long Will The System Live?
If you think the Ecosphere is cruel then fear not. The average life of the small EcoSpheres is two to three years, which is longer than if they were in the real ecosystem as they have no predators to worry about. It is not possible to be precise about this because much depends on the differing light and temperature conditions each system experiences. The actual age of the shrimp is also unknown. Some EcoSpheres have lasted ten years or more. EcoSpheres need warmth as well as light to function correctly. Keeping the temperature fairly constant assists the long-term viability of the system.
The ecosphere makes an amazing gift that will keep you enthralled for days. For more information on the eco-sphere visit PrezzyBox below.
EcoSphere
Good Gift Guide Recommendation : 5/5
4 Comments:
I am going to talk to you about my science project. My task for this project was to make an ecosphere and record data for 4 weeks. I started this project on Feburary 22, 2005 and finished it on March 31, 2005. I used a 1-gallon container,two plants,a worm,ants,androllie pollie
The bugs died first thing because I had the ecosphere in my house and it was dropped when I took it to Mrs. Revis's.
First the plants started to turn yellow, then they stayed that way but the day before my presentation it started to die.
If I could change anything about the ecosphere, I would have kept it in my house. But I preferred to not change anything since it was supposed to be a closed system. I really enjoyed my project. I think it was very interesting.
The world arrived in the mail. It was marked "Fragile." A picture of a cracked goblet was on the package. I unwrapped it carefully, dreading the discovery of a shard of glass or the tinkle of broken crystal. But it was intact. With both hands, I lifted it out and held it up to the sunlight. It was a transparent sphere, about half filled with water... The number 4210 was inconspicuously taped to it. World number 4210: There must be many such worlds. Cautiously, I placed it on the accompanying Lucite stand and peered in.
I could see life in there - a network of branches, some encrusted with green filamentous algae, and six or eight small animals, mostly pink, cavorting, so it seemed, among the branches. In addition, there were hundreds of other kinds of beings, as plentiful in these waters as fish in the oceans of Earth; but they were all microbes, much too small for me to see with the naked eye. Clearly the pink animals were shrimp of some suitably unpretentious variety. They caught your attention immediately because they were so busy. A few that had alighted on branches were walking on 10 legs and waving dots of other appendages. One was devoting all its attention and a considerable number of limbs, to dining on a filament of green. Among the branches, draped with algae much as trees in North Florida are covered with Spanish moss, other shrimp could be seen moving as if they had urgent appointments elsewhere. Sometimes they would change their colors as they swam from environment to environment. One would be pale, almost transparent, another orange, with an embarrassed blush of red.
In some ways, of course, they were different from us. They had their skeletons on the outside, they could breathe water, and a kind of anus was located disconcertingly near their mouths. (They were fastidious about appearance and cleanliness, though, possessing a pair of specialized claws with brushlike bristles. Occasionally, one would give itself a good scrub.)
But in other ways they were like us. It was hard to miss. They had brains, hearts, blood and eyes. That flurry of swimming appendages propelling them through the water betrayed what seemed to be an unmistakable hint of purpose. When they arrived at their destination they addressed the algal filaments with the precision, delicacy and industriousness of a dedicated gourmet. Two of them, more venturesome than the rest, prowled this world's ocean, swimming high above the algae, languidly surveying their domain.
After a while you get so you can distinguish individuals. A shrimp will molt, shedding its old skeleton to make room for a new one. Afterward, you can see the thing - transparent, shroudlike, hanging rigidly from a branch, its former occupant going about his business in a sleek new carapace. Here's one missing a leg. Had there been some furious claw-to-claw combat, perhaps over the affections of a devastating nubile beauty?
From certain angles, the top of the water is a mirror, and a shrimp sees its own reflection. Can it recognize itself?
At other angles, the thickness of the curved glass magnifies them, and then I can make out what they really look like. I notice, for example, that they have mustaches. Two of them race to the top of the water and, unable to break through the surface tension, bounce off the meniscus. Then, upright, they gently sink to the bottom. Their arms are crossed casually, it almost seems, as if the exploit were routine, nothing to write home about. They're cool.
If I can clearly see a shrimp through the curved crystal, it must be able to see me, or at least my eye - some great looming black disk, with a corona of brown and green. Indeed, sometimes as I watch one busily fingering the algae, it seems to stiffen and look back at me. We have made eye contact. I wonder what it thinks it sees.
After a day or two of preoccupation with work, I wake up, take a glance at the crystal world... and they all seem to be gone. I reproach myself. I'm not required to feed them or give them vitamins or change their water or take them to the vet. All I have to do is make sure that they're not in too much light or too long in the dark and that they're always at temperatures between 40 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. (Above that, I guess, they make a bisque and not an ecosystem.) Through inattention, have I killed them? But then I see one poking an antenna out from behind a branch, and I realize they're still in good health. They're only shrimp, but after a while you fund yourself worrying about them, rooting for them.
If you're in charge of a little world like this, and you conscientiously concern yourself about its temperature and light levels, then - whatever you may have had in mind at the beginning - eventually you care about who's in there. If they're sick or dying, though, you can't do much to save them. In certain ways, you're much more powerful than they, but they do things - like breathing water - that you can't. You're limited, painfully limited. You even wonder if it's cruel to put them in this crystal prison.
But you reassure yourself that at least here they are safe from whales and oil slicks and cocktail sauce.
The ghostly molting shrouds and the rare dead body of an expired shrimp do not linger long. They are eaten, partly by the other shrimp, partly by invisible microorganisms that teem through this world's ocean. And so you are reminded that these creatures don't work by themselves. They need one another. They look after one another - in a way that I'm unable to do for them. The shrimp take oxygen from the water and exhale carbon dioxide. The algae (a plural word; singular: alga) take carbon dioxide from the water and exhale oxygen. They breathe each other's waste gases. Their solid wastes cycle also, among plants and animals and microorganisms. In this small Eden, the inhabitants have an extremely intimate relationship.
The shrimp's existence is much more tenuous and precarious than that of the other beings. The algae can live without the shrimp far longer than the shrimp can live without the algae. The shrimp eat the algae (and the microorganisms), but the algae mainly eat light.
Unlike an aquarium, this little world is a closed ecological system. Light gets in, but nothing else - no food, no water, no nutrients. Everything must be recycled. Just like the Earth. In our larger world, we also - plants and animals and microorganisms - live off each other, breathe and eat each other's wastes, depend on one another. Life on our world, too, is powered by light. Light from the Sun, which passes through the clear air, is harvested by plants and powers them to combine carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and other foodstuffs, which in turn provide the staple diet of the animals.
Our big world is very like this little one, and we are very like the shrimp. But there is at least one major difference: Unlike the shrimp, we are able to change our environment. We can do to ourselves what a careless owner of such a crystal sphere can do to the shrimp. If we are not careful, we can heat our planet through the atmospheric greenhouse effect or cool and darken it in the aftermath of a nuclear war. With acid rain, ozone depletion, chemical pollution, radioactivity, the razing of tropical forests and a dozen other assaults on the environment, we are pushing and pulling our little world in poorly understood directions. Our purportedly advanced civilization may be changing the delicate ecological balance that has tortuously evolved over the 4-billion-year period of life on Earth.
Crustacea, such as shrimp, are much older than people or primates or even mammals. Algae go back 3 billion years or more. They've been working together - plants, animals, microbes - for a very long time. The arrangement of organisms in my crystal sphere is ancient, vastly older than any cultural institution we know. The inclination to cooperate has been painfully extracted through the evolutionary process. Those organisms that did not cooperate, that did not work with one another, died. It never occurs to the shrimp to, let's say, pave over an algal garden and make a parking lot. Cooperation is encoded in their genes. It's their nature to cooperate.
But we humans are newcomers, arising only a few million years ago. Our present technical civilization is just a few hundred years old. We have not had much recent experience in interspecies (or even intraspecies) cooperation. We are very devoted to the short-term and hardly ever think about the long-term. There is no guarantee that we will be wise enough to understand our planetwide closed ecological system, or to modify our behavior in accord with that understanding.
Our planet is indivisible. In North America we breathe oxygen generated in the Brazilian rain forest. Acid rain from polluting industries in the American Midwest destroys Canadian forests. Radioactivity from a Soviet nuclear accident compromises the economy and culture of Lapland. The burning of coal in China warms Argentina. Diseases rapidly spread to the farthest reaches of the planet and require a global medical effort to be eradicated. And, of course, nuclear war imperils everyone. Like it or not, we humans are bound up with our fellows and with the other plants and animals all over the world. Our lives are intertwined.
If we are not graced with an instinctive knowledge of how to make our technologized world a safe and balanced ecosystem, we must figure out how to do it. We need more scientific research and more technological restraint. It is probably too much to hope that some Great Ecosystem Keeper in the sky will reach down and put right our environmental abuses. It is up to us.
It should not be impossibly difficult. Birds - whose intelligence we tend to malign - know not to foul the nest. Shrimps with brains the size of lint know it. Algae know it. One-celled microorganisms know it. It is time for us to know it too.
About 2 or 3 years ago, one of those NASA designed Ecoshpere's were given to me as a gift.
We followed the directions precisely, never allowed it to be overlit (even by indirect sunlight) and had the lamp used for lighting the unit on a timer.
I assume this was considered a state-of-the-art design and product, however, it only lived about 6 months and then all I ever saw was algae over the next full year. I'm sure this thing cost the giver quite a bit of greenbacks.
A customer was intrigued with the globe, so I gave it to him complete with the instructions, light and timer. He has still never seen anything but algae either!
I recently talked with someone who told me they had "invented" a self contained grow system... something like this "plants in their own ecosphere"
Now, I have seen in some gift catalogs and now this site these self contained ecospheres... that have stuff living in them, inside a sealed glass sphere... and it all recycles, something like that...
Anyway, it kinda got me thinking. Has anyone ever heard of growing pot in such a way? Would it be possible..?
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