[hydrophyte]

Astrobiology - Ancient Mars Biotope - 12G Bookshelf

I've had this setup going for a year and a half, but for the sake of explanation I'll start the pics from the beginning.

This is a biotope terrarium display intended to represent a speculative ancient Mars or very early Earth landscape with a microbial biocrust growing as the first terrestrial ecosystem.

Tank is the Aquatic HCA 12-gallon bookshelf positioned on a floating shelf that I built with MDF and steel stud-mount brackets.

Egg crate + hobby plastic mesh false bottom. Lighting is an economy 36" planted aquarium strip I found on AMAZON.

Soil substrate is MMS-1 Mars Regolith Simulant, the same material used for laboratory testing of rover technology. This is basically just crushed basalt lava gravel.

Thanks for looking. More content on the way!

Images credits: Mars surface images in Public Domain and mainly from Mars rover missions. Courtesy of NASA, JPL-Caltech, Malin Space Science Systems and other collaborating institutions.

 

[minorhero]

This looks super cool I didn't know you could buy simulated regolith!

is this going to be an undergravel filter?

Are you planning to have plants?

 

[hydrophyte]

This looks super cool I didn't know you could buy simulated regolith!

is this going to be an undergravel filter?

Are you planning to have plants?

Thanks so much!

Yeah, it's not exactly friendly to plant life, or machinery, but provides an approximation of Mars and early Earth conditions.

The egg crate is a terrarium false bottom so that water can drain and prevent stagnant conditions.

This is supposed to be a biotope representation of terrestrial ecosystems on Earth billions of years, or alternatively how they might have grown on Mars when liquid water was still found there, also billions of years ago.

While "colonization" of land on Earth is usually mentioned in reference to the first terrestrial plants, it is very likely that microbial life had already grown in favorable sites on land for a very long time before the first plants. These ecosystems probably resembled present-day microbial mats and biocrusts with Cyanobacteria and other photosynthesizers as primary producers along with heterotroph Bacteria and other groups. Here is a really fascinating article I found as a free pdf that explains these ideas....

https://www.researchgate.net/public..._on_land_and_the_first_terrestrial_ecosystems

I've introduced several Cyanobacteria that I purchased from Carolina Biological Supply for this project. I could have also collected wild Cyanobacteria from the area around here--we have some growing on the side of our house, for example--but I thought it would be neat to start with material having IDs already...

 

[hydrophyte]

Hardscape is these nice rounded basalt rocks I found on eBay. I'm sure they were safe to stick in the setup, but since I wanted to start with the pure cultures and prevent introductions of additional things during set up, I rinsed them off of baked in the oven for twenty minutes.

Layout taking shape...

Another Mars rover pic from the Spirit mission serving as a model...

Images credits: Mars surface images in Public Domain and mainly from Mars rover missions. Courtesy of NASA, JPL-Caltech, Malin Space Science Systems and other collaborating institutions.