the Biosphere

I'm currently reading "The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2" by Jane Poynter, and I'm enrapt. I went to considerable trouble to get this book, which deserves to be ubiquitous (I couldn't find it at bookstores in San Francisco; I attempted to order it at one, who later called me and told me their distributor wasn't getting any more copies. Finally I got it from Amazon.com, and I hate patronizing Amazon, but hey, what can you do when your beloved independent bookstores and then even your local giant chainstore let you down? Even Borders didn't have this book).

I paid very little attention to the Biosphere in the late eighties/early nineties, and I never appreciated the engineering and scientific work which went into it. The building was successfully built to be more airtight than the space shuttle. For the swamp and sea environments, the scientists and engineers felt unequipped to make conscious decisions, so they simply transplanted existing environments as completely as possible. This resulted in some octopi stowing away into the Biosphere, and the octopus is a wily predator. The biospherians were not able to capture the clever octopi, which fed voraciously off the fish intended for the biosphere's residents.

Poynter was charged with determining which insect species to include in the Biosphere (I stopped the book to marvel, They brought insects in with them?), a huge and fascinating task. The decisions were in the end a mix of science and personal taste: giant Madagascar roaches would have been a great choice, as they are efficient at devouring plant material and easily managed, but Poynter and the others balked at the thought of being cooped up with giant roaches. They ended up bringing in four kinds of bees, none of them honeybees, as honeybees would require far too many resources in order to create honey. Consciously bringing stinging insects into a sealed environment is not my idea of common sense. I'd have preferred the giant cockroaches.