Most people tend to use worms as solid waste disposal, though due to system parameter constraints, I've opted for ghost shrimp as my solid waste disposal team. Anyone have good experience with them? Thanks!
Imgur album of terrarium: https://imgur.com/a/YaaKfuY
Hi folks, I have a 9 month old terrarium composed of native plants from a local swamp, consisting primarily of sphagnum, partridge berry, a few assorted worts that I haven't yet identified, and algae growth on the subsoil edges of the jar.
There was a period of initial growth in sphagnum when I first put the terrarium together, which died back as another wave shot up around the edges of the jar. This wave has recently started to recede as the edge sphagnum is turning pale and starting to wilt.
I was wondering if anyone had advice/suggestions or wisdom as to sphagnum care going forward. I imagine it would be useful to have some kind of detritivore in the terrarium that can break down the dying sphagnum and create a more fertile environment for the next wave. Any species in particular I should go with? Are they necessary at all or should I just let the sphagnum do its thing? I just don't want it to die back with no path forward and a have a jar of dead moss sitting around. Thanks!
https://preview.redd.it/wktojw2pe8151.png?width=592&format=png&auto=webp&s=c70f4831959c4fb30ad9357758439653abc44ea8
I'm pretty sure that the fungus races are missing the wind turbine tech that Carnivores have for power generation.
A terraformed world where humans either abandoned the world or were wiped out. There are only two animals that survived to the modern day: Earthworms and springtails. Other organisms include plants, fungi, algae, and prokaryotes. Which one out of the two animals would most likely develop megafauna niches or become more vertebrate like?
As an experiment I grabbed water, pants and detritus from nearby water, and put it in a glass bowl. Today I discovered some asellus aquaticus and I found some posts on fora from people using them as a detritivore in their plantedaquariums. They're a bit creepy but apparently you don't see them too often, and they go trough a lot of dead matter.
I've seen some definitions state that detritivores are organisms that break down dead organic matter, and I've seen other state that detritivores are organisms that MECHANICALLY break down dead organic matter. Which is correct because one definition tells me fungi are detritivores, the other tells me they aren't.
During the Ediacaran and early Cambrian, the multicellular eukaryote kingdoms, Animalia, Plantae, and Fungi, take entirely different roles than in our world, swapping places but with their own unique, ancestral characteristics.
Animals still evolve into sea sponges, and tunicates, and enter symbiosis with algae to form coral. From here, the coral remain sessile and immobile, except for occasional microscopic lineages that drift but still gain most of their energy from the Sun. In this world, animals generally occupy the bottom two rungs of the food chain: photosynthetic producers and static filter-feeders, with a few, rare lineages becoming partially motile. The main way animals move in this world is by dispersing larvae over generations, to settle new areas by following the current, or by becoming barnacle-like parasites of more mobile organisms.
Plants remain partially photosynthetic, for the most part. And while many of the green algae remain non-motile, drifting in the currents, many more of them take a motile path. Like dinoflagellates in our world, they range from pure phototrophs, to hunting heterotrophs, to opportunistic mixotrophs. As plants evolve macroscopic forms, the majority of them continue an at least partially motile strategy. Some resemble predatory coral. Others become more akin to slime molds. The largest group, by far, become detritivores and saprotrophs, much like our world's fungi. Most photosynthetic algae and plants enter symbiosis with animals, like the mycorrhiza of our world's plants.
Fungi, while evolving from ancestors that fed on decaying matter, become motile in two different ways. One branch retains their cell walls, made of chitin. They become slow, usually armored, wormlike colonies of filter-feeders. The individual units of these colonies specialize into different interlocking forms and gradually evolve into forms resembling arthropods, polychaetes, and sea urchins. The other branch of fungi lose their cell walls, becoming akin to amoebae. Some remain in this form, while others join together, forming blob-like colonies similar to our world's slime molds. These slowly develop rigid
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