Fun hypothetical: introducing plants and animals into artificial habitats

Nature Talk
1

This idea comes from The Expanse book series. In the first book, there is an artificial habitat built into an asteroid in our solar system called Eros. The author mentions some plants being grown around the habitat to help with oxygen production (I think it was Devil’s Ivy) and also some small birds flying around. I’m not sure what the point of the birds was supposed to be. Something similar was mentioned for the Mars colony in a later book.

This got me thinking, what would actually make sense to grow on artificial habitats like this? Plants make sense, with any amount of natural air recycling being helpful, but which ones. They would have to be really efficient to be worth it. Obviously some food crops too, but what would do well with lower gravity, and what would be easy to maintain. Definitely some mushrooms, for waste processing and a food source.

What about animals? Most likely some pollinators, but would anything else even make sense? Maybe some decomposers to further help with waste managment. I don’t see large livestock being at all practical, but I bet fish would make the list for aquaponics farms.

Anyway, I was curious what people with some actual biological knowledge would come up with. So have fun figuring this one out!

2

Sounds like Biosphere 2 revisited.

3

Mike, I don’t know enough to suggest individual species, but I have a few general thoughts on this.

The first things that came to my mind were permaculture and the Asian system of rice and fish, which is thousands of years old. But these are not actually closed systems, because they rely on inputs like rain, sun, and organic matter.

Truly closed systems like Biosphere 2 have been tried a number of times, but they always fail, often due to imbalances in gases or nutrients. The earth has had billions of years to evolve massive buffers in the atmosphere and the oceans. These massive buffers absorb gas and nutrient fluctuations on the planet.

Even the functioning of a single plant, when you look at nutrient transport at the molecular level, is incredibly complicated, and contains a lot of pathways that we don’t fully understand.

It’s a long way of saying, “I don’t know!”

4

Didn’t the Russians 50 years ago design much simpler closed systems that actually worked?

found it:

http://www.ibp.ru/science/bios3.php