They begin as tiny samples rooting in gel in tiny jars.
A container like this can be divided into, say, ten or more plugs.
This next photo was already shown here.
Today, two weeks later the plants look like this.
Most have grown taller, some wider to fill in, others grow more slowly.
Some of the plants produce more oxygen than other plants do. Look how active they are.
CO2 is added via regular baking yeast, a scant 1/4 teaspoon, plus 1 cup sugar and one teaspoon baking soda to slow it down. It lasts a little less than a month. The CO2 is delivered by aquarium hose to a power head gently shooting out water that is aimed at another powerhead, so bubbles come shooting out and across the tank far as they can go, not very far, about 1/4 the distance across the tank before rising to the top. There is no outside filter hooked up yet. When fish are introduced then the water filter will be put on and then CO2 hose can be pushed directly the filter's intake to be mixed with the water circulating in the filter then shot out after the water is filtered. That has the advantage over bubbling directly into the tank by mixing the C02 more thoroughly in tinier bubbles, and holding the bubbles in circulated water in the tank for longer.
4 comments:
Don't the fish produce enough CO2 to feed the plants?
No. And they don't produce enough poo to fertilize them either.
So much for symbiosis and aquatic kumbaya.
When I was in grad school, there was another student in a different research group working on growing plants in a carbon-13 enriched atmosphere. He wanted to use MRI on plants but wanted to image carbon instead of hydrogen. So he built an airtight terrarium with gro-lights and fed the plants CO2 enriched in carbon-13. Then he harvested them and prepared sample tissues for analysis. It worked, as I recall.
Similar labeling experiments were used to unravel photosynthetic phytochemistry using carbon-14, back in the 1940's I believe.
Isotopes made it possible.
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