gallusrostromegalus:“Zooarium, which is like a regular zoo but everything is in tanks because

gallusrostromegalus:

“Zooarium, which is like a regular zoo but everything is in tanks because the zoo is for merpeople” is a concept I had not previously contemplated but I am absolutely delighted by it now.  

Ok so this is absolutely overthinking something that is meant to be just a cool piece of art but…from an animal husbandry point of view this must be an extremely impressive exhibit for merpeople.

One of the reasons that maintaining saltwater aquariums is so challenging is because the aquarist essentially has to create the medium the animals are living in almost from scratch. You have to mix salt into freshwater to create the correct salinity and also correctly balance the levels of other elements and chemicals in the water. Then you have to filter the water to remove wastes because it’s a closed system without a constant in-flow and out-flow of water and you have to do water changes to add fresh, correctly mixed water.

The equivalent for this zooarium is that the merpeople keepers would have to “mix” the air in that exhibit and get the correct balance of gases right to maintain air-breathing animals. They would also have to “filter” the air and do “air changes” as waste gases built up in the exhibit.

And this particular exhibit would be especially challenging because most birds are both extra sensitive to air quality and have very high oxygen demands. They shove air into every possible nook and cranny of their body and use as much oxygen as possible to sustain the metabolic demands of flight.

Maintaining birds in a zooarium would be an huge merperson flex, comparable to maintaining a hyper-specialized, super sensitive fish or coral in a saltwater aquarium.