New video!

New hamsternaut embarks upon first underwater mission:

The sort of thing I'd do with more funding

Another video from the Nemo's Garden project. Growing various edible crops in undersea inflatable bubble habs.

In particular what caught my attention was the new observatory dome shown early on in the video (seen in the still above.) That is exactly the sort of inflatable domed enclosure I once proposed as a massive habitat I called "Hamlantis". The idea being that either there are cages which float on the water inside or which are mounted to/suspended from the walls in a ring.

That would let me surface inside to do stuff like changing litter and resupplying food and water, allowing it to be truly permanent. The hamsters could live their entire lives down there happily for many generations, never needing to come to the surface.

It's sort of a waste that they're only using these enclosures for plants. Even one of those could house 100 hamsters, easily. The trick would be running power and air lines from shore to keep the inside warm, and the air breathable. Humidity would also be difficult to manage as it's open on the bottom, but I'm sure something could be worked out.

Another possibility would be to use the bubble as someplace to bring smaller habitats up into when I need to open them up and change the litter, resupply food and water, etc. so I could have a large number of individual smaller habitats, and the bubble as a dry space in which to service them without needing to bring them to the surface. 

To do before Summer:

-Find out cost of custom cut acyrlic for the lid of Mega hab. I can't do any other work on it until this, as if I attach the weights first, it will be awkward and difficult to work with when I later try to add the window to the lid.  

-Get hamcam back online. Looking at what caused the wifi issues last time, fixing up old laptop to stream from.  

-Build the inner floors for Megahab. There will be 2 or 3 floors depending on whether a running saucer will fit with 3. I have some ideas for carving out a crescent of the floor just above it to make room for the saucer while still having 3 floors. Hamsters presumably don't appreciate wastefully high ceilings but would like the additional living space of an extra floor.  

Reminder: I cannot reply to your comments

I don't know why, only that it's a common issue as you'll see if you Google "can't reply to blogger comments". I've tried the solutions suggested there but nothing works. Don't think I'm ignoring your comments! I read them all, but can no longer reply for whatever reason.

New hamsternauts purchased

Recently, I've felt up to owning some fuzzbros again. So I bought two males that I've named George and Scott, after the father of saturation diving George F. Bond, and famed aquanaut Scott Carpenter. For now they're exploring the land habitat, though I was told not to cohabitate males beyond a certain age, so one of 'em will be going underwater fairly soon.