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Under the Sun Cynthia Oi |
‘Biosphere’ imitates
the disharmony in lifeMY OWN private ecosystem is close to collapse. Algae are blooming, the water is murky and the population has dropped 50 percent. This is not supposed to happen.
Not according to the pamphlet that came with the "biosphere," a high-sounding term for a six-inch-high rectangular container of water, fake vegetation and tiny opae, a native shrimp once abundant in Hawaii streams.
I've followed the instructions. I placed the covered tank -- a gift, by the way -- where the temperature ranges between the prescribed 60 to 85 degrees, away from direct sunlight.
A few weeks ago, I noticed patches of scum on the walls, but the pamphlet assured that the gunk was algae that "will actually feed" the little critters. "In time, it will disappear and the glass will clear up."
The pamphlet went on to suggest that the process would be helped along if the tank was placed in the dark for 7 to 10 days, so I moved it inside a cabinet. A week later I pulled it out, anticipating a restored harmony of nature. Nope. The scum had not decreased, but the number of opae did. There had been eight of the flame-red shrimp squiggling around. Now there are only four.
"Lied to again," I thought. This "Mini EcoSystem w/ Opae" was supposed to be a self-contained, symbiotic world where microalgae produced oxygen and food for the shrimp and the shrimps' wastes fertilized the algae. Nowhere in the pamphlet does it say opae are carnivores or cannibalistic. It also doesn't say what to do now that the darkness procedure has failed. Do I stick it back in the cabinet for another 7 to 10 days? With fewer opae, will the algae growth explode?
I'm left to experiment and hope for the best, but I supposed it was naive to believe a viable ecosystem could exist in a contrived environment.
The thing about nature is that every element is reliant on another. Cut down a certain type of tree in a certain type of forest and maybe a fungus that thrived there disappears. An insect that lived off the fungus either dies or moves elsewhere and finds something else to eat, say a plant humans value as food. Meanwhile, the birds that ate the insects starve or find another place to live where their presence sends ripples through another habitat.
There's no way we can predict fully what altering our surroundings will produce. Likewise, we could not foresee how the inventions we've come to depend on would affect our environment.
Thomas Edison could not divine that his flickering light bulb would eventually transform the American landscape as concrete and steel dams harnessed rivers to feed the hunger for electricity. Nor could he have known that someday people would fight bitterly about whether power lines should be stretched across a ridge of a tiny Pacific island.
When Henry Ford rolled out the prototype for the Model T in 1908, he did not envision a future where people would kill each other to control the oil needed to run such vehicles and where whole economies would rest on extraction and production of fuel. He would not have dreamed that people who drive his vehicle's descendants would worry that the roads they carved around volcanic hillsides would be threatened by rock slides from the cliffs above.
Engineers, geologists and other experts will try to figure out how to prevent erosion and gravity at Makapuu, Waimea Bay and other slide-risk areas on Oahu. But all their know-how and all the innovative, new-material netting, screws and bolts will only delay nature.
The notion that we can somehow manage our environment seems presumptuous, but this doesn't mean that attempts to restore natural areas messed up by simple human existence should be abandoned. I'd like to believe that the opae trapped in my fouled little tank won't be the only way to experience nature.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976.
She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.