Floating fish dome lets your koi see the world

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Neat concept. Too bad it doesn’t scale up. If that thing gets too much bigger, the weight of the water will start pulling a vacuum at the top.

You! Fish! Stop playing koi! Do you want to stare in glassy-eyed fascination at the surface world, or not?

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By the way you’re carping on, I take it you think it’s frivolous?

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If your koi pond has a dome in the water 10 metres tall, I think the neighbors might complain.
(In fact with my usual pedantry I note that if the column gets big enough the reduced pressure at the top will cause dissolved gases to escape, so the bubble at the top will be air and water vapor under reduced pressure. The reduced oxygen in the water will discourage the koi from visiting the top. It’s left as an exercise for someone better at gas physics than I am to work out what the tallest dome is in practice, that the koi would actually be able to make full use of.It’s going to be a function with water temperature and atmospheric pressure as variables.

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While most are not floating around, there are already quite large upside-down tanks around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vss2W-wU7o

I see what you did there. Actually, it’s pretty neat: simple, presumably reasonably robust, and gets you a better look at the fish from time to time. At least in that limited sample, though, the fish mostly seem interested in the fact that it also collects food pellets; which just isn’t the sort of devotion I want from my piscid servitors.

Honestly, if the result weren’t so likely to be a leaky, hard-to-clean, difficult to temperature and dissolved chemical regulate, nightmare, I’d be amused to have a fish tank in the style of those “hamster tube” enclosures; but glass, with lots of lobes and lenses so I could see the fishy details as the inhabitants swim past.

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I’m pretty sure those exist, but you’re right about the cleaning nightmare.

I am not that person; but I’d be curious to know how koi would react to such a corner-case environment. Fish presumably didn’t survive this long by being incapable of sensing lack of oxygen(or at least CO2 buildup); but they also evolved in an environment where the oxygen gradient is almost always such that ‘up=more oxygen’. In the case of a suitably large dome, in an otherwise normal pond, the reverse would be true.

Would the koi figure it out(or at least adjust sufficiently quickly and reverse course), or would their low-oxygen heuristics doom them by causing them to seek to rise to the surface where the oxygen should be most abundant, and instead end up in the most-depleted zone at the top of the dome?

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We just need a fish that enjoys a zesty hydrogen peroxide bath every couple of weeks, or maybe ozone guppies.

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Wow. We know nature can be cruel, but do we have to turn it into a spectacle?

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Yes. Yes, we do.

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Yes?

The spectacle of natural processes draws more youngsters to the natural sciences than anything else in my experience.

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Well, I must admit it was rather fun watching my pet garter snake eat worms. And guppies. I’d put guppies in his water bowl and he’d curl into it and snap at them as they went by.

Catfish and ramshorn snails eat most stuff that deposits on tanks, though a clearout would occasionally be needed.

I seem to recall reading that fish sense gradients, not absolute values, so they would probably be all right. Surely someone can do this important experiment and get back to us? Unfortunately my pond is a wildlife pond with no carp.

Explosions?

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Them’s natural.

Sodium & water are just doing what they got to do when mixed

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Yes, but it isn’t a “natural process”, as pure sodium doesn’t occur in the nature inhabited by us. Perhaps the inahbitants of a methane ocean on a Saturnian (perhaps it should be Chronic?) moon regard sodium as an interesting but unreactive soft metal to give the offspring as a kind of Play-Dough, but that’s kind of speculative.

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LoL, then you want to take the natural out of natural sciences & put it where? Don’t get all natural pedantic, there’s no end to that. I know people that get upset when advertisements claim a product is 99% natural, but then when examined it turns out that the remaining 1% is not of extra-terrestrial origins, but then someone else says they’re being anti-extra-terrestrial denying that things of extra-terrestrial origins are natural because isn’t the Sun natural? Don’t we breathe in comet poop to some extent & isn’t it natural?

Oh wait I’ve seen this before in such scenarios. When I worked at a natural history museum we had to tell the kids that natural history is usually used in reference to the study or observation of animals and plants whereas natural science is all-encompassing & includes spaceships and shit. They’d ask because it was a “natural history” museum and they wanted to know what was so natural about oil wells and spaceships featured within. They were right, it should’ve been the natural science museum not just a natural history museum.

You can have you’re point, but really now…

You say, “…that’s kind of speculative.”

I say, “Give this person a research grant.”

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