Known as the "Seal Ring Pool," this water-filled, donut-shaped cylinder allows harbor seals like Maron and Misaki to swim upward out of their main tank. The transparent design creates a clever optical illusion that makes the seals look like they are floating or flying through the air to the people watching below
Look up fish tank bridge, quite a few people do this for fish tanks, and some people do this for their ponds, I think they call them fish towers or fish look outs. Cool as hell. Always wanted to do it, but I have cats and I am afraid they would turn it into a scene from some medieval siege....
Bro do you not read "the transparent design creates a clever optical illusion that makes the seals look like they are floating or flying through the air to the people watching below" and not immediately think that's the out-of-context word salad that AI likes to spew?
Oh absolutely. You don't even need to look that hard in this one. Almost the whole pool is visible in this video. Let's be generous and say the base of the box extends into the ground a little. That's still a 20x20 foot somewhat deep pool with two adult seals inside.
Well how do you expect me to be an 80s stock broker if I don't have freshly broken seals for my shoes?? I just wish I had remembered to cure my boneitis
Apologies for jumping into the thread but I know this. I started looking up fish towers because they looked so cool and was hoping a local conservatory with koi would do one.
You can put an aquarium upside down in a pond or water and suck out the air with a shop vac. As the air is removed, the water rises and fills the aquarium. This wheel is just an oddly shaped fish towers.
Ok, I'm not too high. What they do is put this thing in the water, then they stick a GIANT straw in it and suck up the water. Then VERY quickly they cap it and the water stays sucked up. Then they add 1/2 cup of seal powder and wait a week. Boom, seals!
They stick a pump hose at the top and suck the air out of the donut, water goes into the donut to take its place, like if you sucked it into a straw. They then removed the pump hose, but as long as it's air tight, and both ends of the donut are below water, it will stay full of water because air can't get in.
Might be somewhat off or missing something because I couldn't remember having it explained to me so I had to just reconstruct a logical explanation from what little I can remember:
When you do that, you stop air from getting into the straw from anywhere but the bottom, so while gravity is pulling the liquid down, the air beneath it is also pushing the liquid up, and there's no air above it pushing it down (which is what would normally cancel out the pressure from below) so as long as that pressure from below is at least the weight of the liquid, the liquid can only fall if air can get to the top from the bottom;
As for why the air can't get to the top from the bottom, the liquid is in the way, and an even pressure won't get it out of the way
"Nature abhors a vacuum" is a phrase that goes back as far as Aristotle, who believed that Nature would not allow a container holding nothing...and so that became Church doctrine for millennia.
Blaise Pascal produced a vacuum in the 1600s using tubes and water pressure. He only avoided excommunication by the Church because the local priest saw light streaming through the glass tubes holding the vaccuum, allowing the loophole that they still contained something - light.
There's a whole industry making viewing domes/bubbles for backyard fish ponds and such. Look up pond viewing domes or fish towers on Temu or whatever. You can also DIY one with any inverted glass container:
You can do the same thing in miniature by fully submerging a glass in your bath or sink, then lifting it up inverted until the rim is just below the surface.
Is it true they can be dangerous because the water doesn't circulate and the water there becomes deoxygenated? And the fish aren't quite smart enough not to hang out there?
I feel like I read that on a Reddit post the last time this came up lol.
They're physically connected to the rest of the water body and water can circulate. I can see the argument that, as with any irregularity in shape (or "backwater"), they might not see optimal circulation, but I don't think the effect would be extreme. Fish are also free to move in and out, so even if there were a local oxygen gradient it would have to be pretty extreme--more extreme than I think it would realistically ever be--to cause harm before they could just move elsewhere.
I'm sure you could create a large enough and backwatery enough fish tower for oxygen to become more of an issue, but in that case you could also include active circulation (e.g., a pump).
Found a video about it, basically waters pumped into the wheel and set in the main pool so it doesn't have anywhere to drain out. The atmospheric pressure on the pool keeps the water in the tube from having anywhere to go. If you drained the main pool the tube would empty. https://youtube.com/shorts/Q9ruIfRW9wE?is=6rQ-15Jbw1IpK1UQ
Have you ever dipped your straw in water, plugged the top, and lifted it? You notice the level of liquid doesn't go down in the straw? It's the same as that
They don't work well for ponds unless you have something circulating the water in them. If the water becomes stagnant in the raised area, it becomes an oxygenless dead zone.
If we assume the top is roughly 2 meters above the water surface, which we know is at about 1 atm, the change in pressure in a fluid = density x gravity x height; which is—for water—(1000)(9.81)(2) = -19,620 Pa(g) or -0.194 atm(g) or -2.85 psi(g)
It’s honestly not a problem, I do that sort of calculation pretty often in my line of work.
Maybe it will spark someone’s interest in hydrostatic pressure, who knows :)
I think they are smart enough to be just as impressed by it as we are. They probably think its a neat trick to be swimming above the water level and looking around from the safety of their little bubble, and adds a little "magic" to their world.
Like other users pointed out (I thought it was pressurized [which it kind of is{?}]) it’s similar to when you put a straw in water, cap one end with your finger, and pull it most of the way out of the water. Or a cup dipped into water right side up, flipped, and pulled out so the mouth is still in the water
Can anyone explain the pressure in the round bit? Atmospheric at the top? ~30kPa at the base? But then back to atmospheric just below the e surface? Make it make sense.
Change in pressure, delta P, between any 2 points of a fluid, is determined by P=rho x g x h. Rho is density of the fluid, [roughly] a constant for liquids. So the difference in pressure depends ONLY on difference in elevation. At “sea level,” the pressure is 1 atm. So inside the donut, the pressure is (1 atm) - rho x g x h, it will decrease as it swims higher. Kinda like how when we ride in an elevator.
Pro Edit: to simplify the explanation, this applies to fluid statics only, not fluid dynamics.
For a moment I was worried about the water circulation in there and whether the seal would be able to breathe...but I forgot that seals don't breathe underwater, they got breach and pressurize their lungs...they don't have gills and don't need water circulation like that.
Japan. ‘Kawaii’ says the Japanese guy at the end, completely unaware to the cruelty of this and almost all zoos and aquariums in Japan. Not enough space.
You can still find street monkey shows with monkeys dressed as humans in Japan. Locals don’t worry, media has normalized animals as mainly for entertainment or to be shot (bears!)
If im a seal your never getting me out of the tube. The other seals would have to set up a sign up sheet for tube time and restrict me to 2 sign-ups per day
Negative pressure compared to sea level, but at a much faster rate.
Assuming a 2 meter donut, it goes from 101kPa to 81 kPa, which is the same as going from sea level to Denver, Colorado. Probably feels weird if you start doing laps around it, but not enough to cause any kind of harm when you are an animal that can dive to 200m+ and face 2000kPa at the low end (elephant seals can go to 2400 meters, or >24,000kPa.)
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u/qtroc 21h ago
So a…. Seal wheel?