hi Suggest you look around the net for some inspiration. There are sooo many setups and methods don't know where to start. lol. Google "vivariums ""Orchidariums" or my favorite "dutch vivariums" This will give you some idea on how simple or elaborate these setups can be . Much advice on heating cooling ,light ,air circulation and the mind boggling choice of plants and animals that can go into these lol I recently converted my FW paludarium back to FW aquarium while the greenhouse 150 gallon was converted from FW aquarium in to a wet/dry lowland tropical. I got out of SW altogether due to the maintenance and expense.frequent power failures and getting old lol. Look around and see what appeals to you. Though that tank seems quite large now within two months of setup it will seem tooo small lol Good luck!!! gary

I don't think a computer fan running on a cheap variable voltage wall-wart is very complex, and it's reliable, cheap and effective :) I also very much doubt that the heating due to friction is significant for ceiling fans. A more likely reason is that a low speed breeze is just as effective as a fast one for cooling, and obviously uses less energy. You can make a computer fan go slower by dropping the voltage, or putting two in series. Bigger fans move more air for a given voltage. Ok, having got the negatives out of the way, I like your ideas - you are thinking outside the box (does that make sense for a terrarium?). Let me share a few things with you. Firstly, there are two general kinds of fluid flow we can talk about: Laminar and turbulent. Laminar is 'more efficient', in that you can get more airmass moving (momentum) for a given input of energy. Turbulence chews up a considerable amount of energy, you can see this if you compare the water flowing out of a tap with a hose connector at the end, vs one without. The hose connector reduces the turbulence, increasing the rate at which the water can escape. However, if you want to get the air close to a surface you need turbulence. Without the turbulence the air forms a boundary layer (on a windy day you'll notice that the air is more still closer to the ground, even in the middle of a paddock). In your example of stomata breathing you wanted to get the air closer to the leaf's surface, this would require turbulence. (Having said that, I think the gas diffusion rate for CO2 in air is faster than you'll be able to blow air, so I don't think this is really a problem.) To get turbulence you are better off with a narrow stream of fast moving air hitting some kind of obstacle. This leads on to "matching". In electronics we have an idea called 'impedance matching', the same idea appears in fans and ducts, in water flows, in sound systems, pipe organs and car engines. The idea is that if you directly connect a thin tube with high 'whatsit' to a large tube with low 'whatsit' you'll get a reflection occuring at the boundary. This reflection causes signal loss, or energy loss (the same thing really :). In the little gramophone that we wound round and round we used an exponential horn to match the sharpish needle's high pressure, small volume sound to the room's low pressure, large volume. You have the same problem with your fan. Water falling is a relatively high pressure, low volume fluid flow. We want to match that to the low pressure, high volume fluid flow of air. There are many simple ways to do this. All of your nifty ideas have been mechanical (converting the falling water to mechanical motion, and then back using a primitive fan (propellor type fans are vastly more efficient than ones that work by flapping, or by impulse means, btw). Can we do the impedance match any other ways? When I go and visit

The Mimosa would require a great deal of light to do well (they grow in full sun in dry areas here in the USVI) but the "banyan" might do alright. I don't know what species it is, but I've had good success with Ficus citrifolia... i glued it to the underside of an angled piece of driftwood and it immediately began wrapping roots around the driftwood and sending down aerial roots. Very exciting! I think Florida has F. citrifolia and F. aurea... both good stranglers. I would suggest looking in the cracks of old stone walls and on rooftops, etc... they like to germinate in such areas and yanking a little baby from there with some roots attached will make your life much easier.

Cool! I made a tiny terr. like that at the beginning of summer (this year), in which I just have moss. I may put a micro-mini sinningia in there soon (if the seeds every germinate), and I was also thinking of a small sundew if those don't work. Great minds think alike, eh? =) I haven't been able to take any pics of mine yet. It's much smaller than yours though. I got the glass bowl at a thrift store. Yours is very nicely landscaped! I like the contrast between the plants, and the rocks are nice, too. Nice little webpage!