The Future of Controlled Ecosystem Enclosure Experiments

Abstract

The dangerin attempting to predict the future of science, or indeed any event, is that precise predictions can turn out to be inaccurate while woolly ones are next to useless. In the field of physics (Campbell 1939) it was formerly shown very precisely, using good mathematics, that space travel was not possible; yet de Nostradame (1568) was able to predict the space race 400 years earlier (if only someone had had the ability to understand exactly what it washe had predicted in the nebulous language of a prophet). Of these two glimpses of the future, I find the precise prediction, although inaccurate due to some wrong assumptions, to be the more informative. In fact, to be able to disagree with anexact conclusion is much of what research is all about. It is lack of belief in our current understanding of nature that drives the researcher to seek new explanations and, in so doing, to seek new ways to investigate the world around us. The driving force in the development of controlled aquatic ecosystems has been a desire to bridge a gap between the size scales of laboratory experiments and field observations (Strickland 1967).