sunny
pond
ecopod



Monkey's sunny pond ecopod was first set up in early 1996. It's a brightly lit aquarium with a single bubble stone. The bottom is rich, soft mud, covered with a thick carpet of multicolored algae. There's a dense forest of beautiful water plants, and hundreds of tiny critters scoot around everywhere. There are no fish, because one small fish would eat up all the critters in just a few days.

As of May, 1997
the sunny pond ecopod
contained (at least):
3 kinds of Hydra
4 kinds of rotifers
2 kinds of water mold
1 kind of (diving) beetle
12 kinds of vascular plants
1 kind of Daphnia (water fleas)
4 kinds of molluscs (snails & limpets)
3 kinds of copepods (tiny crustaceans)
4 kinds of ostracods (tiny crustaceans)
8 kinds of worms (probably many more)
uncountable hundreds of kinds of bacteria
3 kinds of water mites (related to spiders)
4 kinds of cyanobacteria (prokaryotic algae)
26 kinds of protozoa (probably dozens more)
1 kind of midge (a tiny fly and its aquatic larvae)
18 kinds of eukaryotic algae (probably many more)
Monkey enjoys going out into the world to collect new living forms to add to the system. Which species will do well? He lets the system sort itself out, without trying to direct the process, and as a result the ecology finds its own balance.


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