Chemostat Versus the Lake

Abstract

For a biologist, chemostat is a replica of a simple lake. Thus, chemostat models are widely used to represent the growth of species in a lake where the organisms such as algae feed on growth-limiting nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. The analogy between a simple lake and a chemostat becomes clear from the Table 2.1. Availability of a nutrient in a natural system such as a lake depends on the nutrient input and inflows. The algal communities in a lake are observed to survive even at low (undetectably small) levels of nutrient contrary to the opinion that they perish due to insufficiencies. But there is a growth, of course, oscillatory and low. To represent this phenomenon of oscillatory growth in the model equations of a chemostat, researchers have tried various means.