r/Ecosphere

I am an aquarist and I decided on a whim to get a sample of some rocks, mud, water, and flora from a Lake Ontario beach visit today. I decided that I want to make an ecosphere! Didn't even know this was the word for it until I searched just now about how to do it. I saw the beginner guide here and I figured I'd share my journey!

I have a couple of 3-gallon glass water jugs (maybe two gallon?) and I'm going to be going back to get a bigger sample of water, mud, and plants soon.

Behold, what I dubbed my "autism bottle" as I was making it. It's got some cool visible meiofauna bopping around in there!

Swift SW350, Galaxy S24, 40x

I'm just sitting at a lake and the thought of building a small ecosphere from it crossed my mind. So I walked around a bit to see what I could gather.

Unfortunately I did not find water plants but algae instead. Could an ecosphere in a closed jar survive with soil, water and algae from the pond and some floaters from my aquarium?

Went out to a slow creek and took some sediment and plant from a much slower part of the stream. Currently, just keeping it opened the air with a cloth and rubber band over the top.

How can I know the best time to cap it if I want to do that?

Creatures:

Bladder Snails

Flatworms

Boogie worms

Some kind of Nymphs

Mites

Copapods

Ostracods

Amphipod

Tiny white microbes

My 48oz lake jar I collected a month ago. Scuds and snails are booming but the snails might be overwhelmed by scuds. I'm quarantining some hornwort from the same body of water before introducing so I don't get more snail leeches. How do we look anyway?

Please, PLEASE do not tell me these are mosquito larvae or something😭

Going through a bit of a bacterial bloom. That second pic is after at least a 50% water change with the same sourced water. Threw in an air stone today because of how bad the bloom got.

All collected locally. Fairly certain I got some eleocharis type grasses and elodea canadensis.

I have an ecosphere that is a little over two months old and I’m afraid my bladder snails in there have gotten out of hand. Will they rebalance on their own? Or will this trigger a mass kill off?

Went to the beach in CT with the family on Sunday and built this out when I got home. Initially I saw a copepod the first day but no visible life since.

I’ve had this ecosphere for about two years. It’s on the windowsill and even goes through seasonal changes. The string algae appears during the summer and the shrimp also breed a lot more during the summer. There’s copepods, ramshorn snails and trumpet snails. The elodea seems to die almost as much as it grows which is pretty surprising. And the shrimp population stays at just about 5-8. One of my favourites is watching the shrimp aswell as the elodea pearling.

So I recently combined the walstad method with the ecosphere method and I ended up with this weird creature that walks around and hangs out on my plants in my enclosed fishbowl. Anybody have any idea if its some sort of weird spiky isopod or something else. Very hard to capture clearly but I tried my best.

Hey there, I’ve been trying to start up a fully aquatic ecosphere. I have clay/ hydro balls at the bottom for drainage and bacteria filtration. I have sand over a mesh cover to separate the hydro balls. Then I have stones rocks. I’ve attempted to start with some drift wood, and Java moss, as well as a moss ball. How ever the drift wood created too much decay for the start up. I removed some things to try and do a reset. I’ve emptied most of the water out of the jar. The water was/ is very brown. I did air out the jar starter, so it no longer smells bad. Ultimately after quite some time, I’d like to add brine shrimp after everything is fully functional and thriving. Any advice for getting the jar back up and running? I do have a closed jar. Again the jar is open now to help with the bacteria imbalance. Literally any advice is welcome. I have noted that the sand has settled down past the mesh separating the sand, and hydro balls.

Sorry for my shaky hand, I found these in my flytrap's water tray, i think they are copepods ore smth like that