Synthocean

What is synthocean?

Produced by Charmaine Guo, Vivian Tu, Tate Darin, Ethan Li

Our planet is encased in ocean and has highly active volcanoes that spew out gaseous mixtures of carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfides, and nitrogen oxides. Due to the abundant amounts of water on its surface and its relatively high concentration of greenhouse gases, our planet experiences high amounts of precipitation. Rain captures the gaseous compounds in the atmosphere and leaches phosphorous from the volcanic rocks, carrying many elements essential to life as it enters the oceans. Over the course of the planet's geologic history, various life forms have evolved from the most nascent molecular interactions that occurred within the chemical environment of its hydrosphere.

One piece of the puzzle

This model shows the environment of the planet with a couple producers and consumers as well as decorative rocks that have luminescence.

Producer: Octoflora

Named after its 8 toes and its signature brightly colored sensors, the Octoflora is a nitrifying organism. It converts nitrogen dioxide to nitrogen trioxide in the presence of oxygen.

Consumer: Nauticella

Named after its nautical habitet and how its long limbs are shaped and moved like flagella, the Nauticella eats the Octoflora for energy.

2d simulation

This 2d simulation demonstrates the concepts behind the environment. We wanted to build a habitat with areas that producers are more likely to spawn, indicted by the green circles. Because the producers are more likely to spawn there, the consumers form "communities" where they gather fight over resources. The more hungry consumers win.

The 2D ecological simulation outlines a simple ecological relationship between two entities, consumers and producers.

The consumer must continuously find ways to eat a producer and increase a quantity called hunger, because their hunger drops to 0 linearly with time and with no replenishing the consumer will die. The speed at which a consumer can move is also defined by its hunger, and follows a logistic relationship where speed = 1 + (1/e^((-hunger + (10a)) + 1) where e is Euler's constant and a is a parameter determining the sharpness of the logistic curve, which we chose by trial and error. A consumer will die either if its hunger hits 0 or if its maximum age (a randomly generated integer between 250 and 350 seconds) is reached. Also, consumers are able to fight if they come within a certain distance. The logic is that if a consumer's hunger is higher than the other it will win the fight because it is stronger, and if they both have the same hunger the outcome of the fight is a 50/50 chance. Reproduction is also considered for consumers, and in order to balance computational costs with realism instead of checking the distance between all producers every timestep we introduced a model where there is some probability of a consumer spawning every timestep, with the probability being much higher in areas with higher densities of consumers.

Producers only die when they are eaten by a consumer or they hit their maximum age, which is also a randomly generated integer between 250 and 350 seconds. They are spawned in with some probability every timestep, with much higher probability in zones called fields which are meant to represent areas in an ecological system with high amounts of resources (i.e. hydrothermal vents). Fields are generated only at the start of the simulation and distributed randomly across the screen.

Periodic boundary conditions are also implemented, meaning if a consumer hits the top of the world it will be respawned at the bottom (and vice versa).

Because consumers tend to congregate near producers as they are dependent on them for life, you can see ecological communities develop over time. Future goals for the project are to use the data generated by this simple model to understand how social networks develop in ecological systems. One idea is to make it so when a viewer clicks on any given consumer with their mouse, it highlights all the other consumers that have been within some radius of the selected consumer at least once in some period of time. This could help give a sense of how closed ecological networks develop based on food accessibility.

More Detail

3d simulation

This 3d simulation demonstrates the graphics and the environment. Here we have rain clouds that put sulfuric acid into the ocean environment. The producers use the sulfate and other chemicals to produce chemical energy. The consumers move randomly until they detect the producer and start moving towards them to eat them.

Sulfuric acid rain

Sulfur dioxide is spontaneously oxidized to sulfate as it is captured by water droplets in the presence of oxygen, forming sulfuric acid. Sulfate can be used as a terminal electron acceptor in cell respiration.

Nitrate

Nitrite is consumed and converted into nitrate by nitrifying microbes. Nitrate can be used as a terminal electron acceptor.

Water Droplets

A disproportionation reaction occurs between nitrogen dioxide and water when it is captured by water droplets, forming nitrite and nitrate ions.

Sulfate to Sulfide

Sulfate-reducing microbes reduce sulfate to sulfide. Sulfide can be used as terminal electron acceptor.

Nitrate Reaction Simulation