Six living habitats · one hand-built enclosure
A living system, built by hand and close enough to watch.
miniBIOTA brings freshwater, terrestrial, and saltwater habitats into one room so the relationships that shape a landscape can be seen at human scale.
Enter the field recordThe complete six-chamber enclosure · studio view
A small world that makes relationships visible.
Six biomes across three realms house real organisms inside a system engineered largely from scratch.
The habitats connect in specific ways. They share atmosphere, humidity, and overhead light. Organisms and organic matter cross boundaries. Rain moves down the terrestrial slope through the Lakeshore into the Freshwater Lake. The saltwater side circulates separately and never mixes with the fresh.
Those are the kinds of links that hold a landscape together. This one is small enough to watch them work.
From the living system
Weekly miniBIOTA Update: June 11, 2026
A weekly field note from the miniBIOTA system: what changed, what was observed, and what we are watching next.
- 01 Cyanobacteria and mud crabs put the Seagrass Meadow on watch
- 02 Two shoreline snails joined the Marine Shore watch
- 03 True Mangrove Tree Crabs started using the edges
The system behind the habitats
Look closely at the machinery behind the weather.
Four vertical atmosphere processors were built to condense rising moisture against cooled surfaces and return it to the habitats as rain.
- 01
The stacked internal shelves give moist air repeated surfaces for condensation during active cooling.
- 02
The rain cycle was demonstrated before the chiller went offline for pump repair; the image documents the built processor, not a claim that cooling is active now.
Watch it change
One frame is not a timeline. Repeated, dated photographs of the same subject are not yet available in the field record, so this sequence will not pretend otherwise.
Awaiting a second verified, dated view of the same subject.
Quiet signals from the enclosure
Weather across the six biomes.
Four biomes have temperature and humidity sensors connected to this page. The remaining two are named here without invented readings.
Wave motor only · no temperature or humidity sensors
27.2°C · 47.4% RH
27.9°C · 86.2% RH
27.5°C · 44.7% RH
28.6°C · 45.5% RH
No temperature or humidity sensors
Go deeper