There's a nice article in this summer's edition of the U of G Portico on the new limnotron facilities.
Premium brewing for ecosystem health
0% alcohol by volume
But U of G’s 48,000-litre lake-in-a-tank will be teeming with algae, bacteria, copepods and rotifers
Story by Andrew Vowles
Photos by Ross Davidson-Pilon
So
they’re brewing beer now on the U of G campus? That’s what you might
think after a glance at the six stainless-steel tanks standing upright
in a two-storey room in a new building on the west side of campus.
You'd be half-correct. Those are modified beer vats — indeed, the
research team using them called on Sleeman Breweries to help design
them — and they’re brewing up something here using micro-organisms. But
it’s not beer.
This is the University’s world-renowned Biodiversity Institute of
Ontario (BIO). And inside those new steel tanks, Guelph ecologists plan
to create experimental ecosystems — think “ponds in tanks” — to help us
better understand the complex natural world.
Early this year, a Guelph research team completed installation of the
limnotron (“limno” is Greek for “lake”) at the south end of the BIO
Building. That building opened in 2007 on the site of the University’s
former seal research facility. Headed by integrative biology professor
Paul Hebert, the BIO includes the limnotron as well as the Ontario
Agricultural College’s insect collection and herbarium (the latter two
facilities are housed nearby in recently renovated quarters in the
Bovey Building and Zoology Annex I, respectively).
The BIO brings together ecologists and biologists studying
biodiversity, or the variety of living things on Earth. Most of the
offices and labs in the building are devoted to the Canadian Centre for
DNA Barcoding, a central node for national and international efforts to
use technology developed at Guelph for identifying species of organisms
using a telltale bit of genetic material.
As more of those species creep towards threatened or endangered status
— the BIO website says we’re in “a global biodiversity crisis” — it’s
important to catalogue the Earth’s existing diversity. But Prof. John
Fryxell, Integrative Biology, says we also need to understand what
sustains the range of living things on the planet, how that diversity
itself shapes life and what might happen if we continue to lose certain
species — a critical aspect of that biodiversity crisis. Contrasting
his neighbours’ work in species identification with the ecosystem
studies planned in the limnotron’s steel tanks, Fryxell says: “They’re
developing new ways to measure biodiversity. Our challenge is to figure
out what it all means to real ecosystems.”
He’s getting the limnotron ready along with departmental colleagues
Profs. Kevin McCann, Denis Lynn, Tom Nudds and John Klironomos, as well
as post-doc Neil Rooney. By early February, the six upright vats — each
15 feet high and 12 feet across — had been installed, filling most of
the two-storey space. (Each tank — all 2,400 pounds’ worth — was swung
in horizontally through a roll-up garage door, then manoeuvred upright
during a pas de deux involving two forklift trucks and careful
attention to Archimedes’ principle of the centre of gravity.) Installed
later this winter were a catwalk connecting the tanks and plumbing, and
pumps to run the freshwater systems inside them. ...
You can read the complete article
here.
