
A Year Ago I Put Saltwater in a Jar [video] - danso
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OG5jyRGhLg
======
dreamcompiler
Somewhere on Galactic Youtube there's a video entitled "A Billion Years Ago I
Put Single-Celled Organisms on a Water Planet in the Outer Spiral Arm. Look
What Happened."

~~~
jrockway
If the GalaxyTube is anything like Earth YouTube:

Why you must see the TOP TEN creatures descended from one weird experiment TEN
HUNDRED THOUSAND THOUSAND YEARS AGO

sponsored by Squarespace

~~~
wyldfire
"They're made out of meat."

~~~
DoctorPenguin
"And they're growing more self aware any minute."

------
fit2rule
I live near a fresh-water lake in the middle of Europe, and decided to do this
experiment with my kids a few years back .. we took a jar, scooped up some
water, threw a couple small bits of algae in, and took it back to our kitchen,
where we watched it daily for months.

It was extraordinary to see things growing right away .. the kids loved
getting up and checking on 'the critters and the goop', as we called it.

Our patience was rewarded when I spotted a tiny hydra had attached itself to
the side of the jar ..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_\(genus\))

We watched it grow and grew, going from near-microscopic to the size of one of
the kids finger nails, turning a deep and vibrant red as it aged.

There were lots of other things too, which we never got quite around to naming
.. freshwater shrimps, a couple of tiny fish (which didn't survive a heat-wave
also, alas) .. but eventually it became a murky mess, and we cleaned the jar
out for other experiments.

This is a really neat way to teach kids about life, in my opinion. The next
time we do it, we'll rig up a USB microscope and have it pointed into the
depths - I have a feeling that my kids are going to find operating the
microscope far more intriguing than any video game. Would be grand to discover
there's a microscope out there that can be remotely moved .. we may have to
cannibalise a 'light following flower robot' to rig up our own
"Exploratorium"™ .. ;)

~~~
tzs
Another good one, to teach about how there is microscopic life all around us,
is to make sourdough bread using wild yeast and bacteria. Starting with just
flour and water, you can capture the wild yeast and lactobacilli that are
floating around your kitchen and cultivate them in a ball of dough. You can
establish a colony in such a dough ball that can last centuries [1], breaking
off some of it whenever you want to make some bread.

Sourdough bread made from your colony might taste a little different than
sourdough bread made from someone else's colony, because different places have
different subsets of the something like 20 species of yeast and 180 species of
lactobacillus there are, and different species can have different flavor.

[1] Boudin Bakery in San Francisco is still using the colony it started in
1849.

~~~
dnhz
Check this out: [http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/37259/mythbusters-grain-
yea...](http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/37259/mythbusters-grain-yeast-or-air-
yeast)

It seems like the source of microorganisms is from the input grain itself, not
what's in the air.

------
aasasd
The incredibly serene mood combined with late-90s tv-funk music put me into a
weird state of nostalgic careless bliss. (As opposed to the more typical
nostalgic feeling of unrecoverable loss.)

~~~
Waterluvian
Speaking of nostalgic bliss, Infochammel does this for me. With its HC2K
TechnoLoc encoding I get a strong dose of positive vibes reminding me of my
Apple IIgs and childhood. I'm a huge sucker for that style of graphics.

[https://youtu.be/rWN8KN7C6Is](https://youtu.be/rWN8KN7C6Is)

------
steve_adams_86
I have to try this with the kids. I wonder, if you aerated the water slightly
and protected it a bit from things like heatwaves, would you see more life?
Would the little crab have lived longer? Or would the higher life capacity due
to increased oxygen also lead to more ammonia spikes that aeration alone
wouldn't help the ecosystem process. I guess it's something to experiment
with.

~~~
Trav5
It would be neat to aerate it without breaking the closed system. Maybe a
magnetic connection through the glass. Motor on the outside and prop on the
inside... Does add complexity though.

~~~
avn2109
Probably almost every wet-bench lab has a magnetic stir bar, as in [0].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3BoXEWCF2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3BoXEWCF2E)

~~~
saagarjha
But that would just mix in air from the top of the jar?

~~~
avn2109
Oh I guess I don't understand what it means "to aerate" then.

------
jbuzbee
I bought one of those small "EchoSphere" water globes[1] back in 2002. It
originally had 3-4 little shrimp and algae. within a few months, all but one
of the shrimps were gone. But now, nearly 17 years later, the one remaining
shrimp is still going strong. Amazing!

[https://eco-sphere.com/](https://eco-sphere.com/)

~~~
zakki
Interesting. Would you share the picture of it?

~~~
jbuzbee
The shrimp is so small, it would be hard to get a photo, but it looks pretty
much like the "Small Sphere" from the link above.

------
pontifier
Somewhere, as a society, we should have thousands of these with random
collections of "stuff" like this. It seems like finding combinations that can
survive indefinitely would be useful.

~~~
justinator
I fear that it would get so popular, certain habitats would become destroyed
by people wanting to capture a little bit of it in a jar.

~~~
Dylan16807
With 0.1 square kilometers of habitat, you can fill a million jars. Seems like
a pretty remote risk.

~~~
justinator
How many exotic pets have we made endangered or extinct already?

~~~
Dylan16807
Pet animals are stupendously less common than "one square foot of dirt is more
than enough".

If you charge a couple dollars you can make the habit grow with every
purchase.

~~~
justinator
I think the idea that a healthy habitat can be kept in a jar is a misguided
one. What was the ecosystem in this example, really? Some sea lettuce, algae,
some nematodes and a dead crab. That's not healthy, diverse, or complex.

The real thesis should be: without room, natural ecosystems will turn more
like this jar: barely holding on at a low level. What we can do is put less
pressure onto a natural ecosystem. For example, not digging little parts of it
up to keep, essentially as pets.

Related, higher, more complex organisms need room to range. Remove one, and a
large part of the surrounding environment is affected.

------
jcims
Watching little creatures live their lives under the microscope can be
calming. Nick Moore has some darkfield microscopy videos of aqutic life that
are pretty nice and educational to watch:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPhdZFYLanpzdQYgkJoi3...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPhdZFYLanpzdQYgkJoi3vTzOtpr7cwU0)

------
dekhn
I've had lots of fun using microscopes to look at things as a hobby. It
started when I went to the Boston Science Museum about 30 years ago and saw
some rotifers tooling about in a dish. At the time I was into computers and i
figured that living things were effectively mechanical computers/robots and
that they could be understood through reductionist approaches (looking closely
at their components and then building up their complex behaviors from those
components). This leads to the "Can a biologist fix a radio, or understand
schemes?" problem (bing it).

Eventually, through many years of reading and experimentation I realized that
you could convert an inexpensive CNC platform into a microscope- the 3 stage
system that moves the router head around can hold an objective and a
microscope slide. So I built one of these and demonstrated it at Maker Faire
(thanks, Google, for paying for all this). Highlight was showing Daphnia,
which happened to be pregnant at the time and gave birth live in front of a
few visitors ("did we just watch the miracle of birth?")

Later I learned that rotting fruit and wet moss from the yard is a great
source of microbes, and you can leave standing freshwater with some moss in it
to get all sorts of rich ecosystems. I just love rotifers, they're such fun to
watch.

------
astura
This is absolutely amazing! I live a few miles from the ocean so I'm totally
going to try this!

Crabs - there's hundreds of thousands of (very small) crabs living on the
beach, at least around here (from what I've seen) so grabbing a tiny one
accidentally isn't unusual or unexpected.

------
shasheene
I haven't seen anyone mention it here, but this concept is known as a
"terrarium".

There have been terrariums that have been sealed for 50+ years and are still
thriving.

------
ChuckMcM
This was pretty fascinating. I agree with the micropore idea for passive gas
exchange although some of the gases leaving would be fairly pungent (ammonia
for example).

I am wondering if you could put a tube in the water, vertically along the side
which was facing sunward. Then using the heat from the sun to heat the water
in the tube which would rise enough to create a natural aeration drip.

------
acomjean
I understand the "Low maintence" desire, as well as some curiosity, but isn't
this just a unmaintained salt water aquarium? We all know how its going to end
up..

Salt water aquariums are difficult to maintain but can be very rewarding and
learning experience (Nitrate, nitrite, phosphates maintence etc...)

~~~
lucb1e
> We all know how its going to end up..

Uh, might be just me, but I have no idea how this ends up. I would expect dead
very soon, but this has been going for over a year now, so clearly I didn't
even get that right.

------
makz
As an aquarium keeper myself I must say that this is the best YouTube channel
ever. Thanks for sharing.

------
zaat
Thank you for this, really amazing.

Anyone have an idea how did the crab survived for so long? What did it eat?

~~~
Sharlin
Presumably algae and smaller invertebrates, like all crabs.

------
lloydatkinson
I’ve been waiting for an update on this on his channel for a while, really
interesting stuff.

