Neat concept. Too bad it doesnât 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?
By the way youâre carping on, I take it you think itâs frivolous?
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. Itâs 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.Itâs going to be a function with water temperature and atmospheric pressure as variables.
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, itâs 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 isnât the sort of devotion I want from my piscid servitors.
Honestly, if the result werenât so likely to be a leaky, hard-to-clean, difficult to temperature and dissolved chemical regulate, nightmare, Iâd be amused to have a fish tank in the style of those âhamster tubeâ enclosures; but glass, with lots of lobes and lenses so I could see the fishy details as the inhabitants swim past.
Iâm pretty sure those exist, but youâre right about the cleaning nightmare.
I am not that person; but Iâd be curious to know how koi would react to such a corner-case environment. Fish presumably didnât 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 âup=more oxygenâ. 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?
We just need a fish that enjoys a zesty hydrogen peroxide bath every couple of weeks, or maybe ozone guppies.
Wow. We know nature can be cruel, but do we have to turn it into a spectacle?
Yes. Yes, we do.
Yes?
The spectacle of natural processes draws more youngsters to the natural sciences than anything else in my experience.
Well, I must admit it was rather fun watching my pet garter snake eat worms. And guppies. Iâd put guppies in his water bowl and heâd 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?
Themâs natural.
Sodium & water are just doing what they got to do when mixed
Yes, but it isnât a ânatural processâ, as pure sodium doesnât 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 thatâs kind of speculative.
LoL, then you want to take the natural out of natural sciences & put it where? Donât get all natural pedantic, thereâs 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 theyâre being anti-extra-terrestrial denying that things of extra-terrestrial origins are natural because isnât the Sun natural? Donât we breathe in comet poop to some extent & isnât it natural?
Oh wait Iâve 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. Theyâd ask because it was a ânatural historyâ museum and they wanted to know what was so natural about oil wells and spaceships featured within. They were right, it shouldâve been the natural science museum not just a natural history museum.
You can have youâre point, but really nowâŚ
You say, ââŚthatâs kind of speculative.â
I say, âGive this person a research grant.â
