Introduction
This publication follows the procession surrounding a self-made Rainwater Pond, created to investigate the organisms in aquatic ecosystems through scientific and artistic means. The research was conducted during the class Life in an aquatic ecosystem, given at Bauhaus University Weimar, in the Wintersemester 2024/25, facilitated by Mindaugas Gapševičius & Alessandro Volpato. Participants of the class were: Dahye Seo, Cosmo Schüppel, Jan Munske and Negin Ehtesabian.
Life in an aquatic ecosystem set out to build rebuild a pond created in a previous semester, in the Campus Garden of Bauhaus University and to investigate its evolving ecosystem: Who lives there, which microbes colonized it first, what do their interactions look like and what are the effects of human intervention on the development of the ecosystem?
Lifecycle of a pond
This introductory text will discuss how ponds are formed without human intervention and how these process is reflected in the Storm Water Pond.
To understand how a pond gets created we need to talk about a central term of biological research: succession. Succession describes “observed sequences of vegetation (...) or animals (...) in time” (William, 1973) . In other words, describing the succession of an ecosystem means to describe how it changes over a defined period of time. In a succession, the different species of an ecosystem influence it in such a way, that its living conditions become favorable for them.“Succession is supposed to continue until the species combination best suited to the regional climate and the site are established” (William, 1973). In this process rivalries, symbiosis, extinctions, dominations and equilibriums are established.
The natural succession of a pond– a body of water that lets light penetrate the bottom, is shallow enough for rooted water plants to grow throughout and that has no wave action on the shoreline (Biggs, 2005) – can be divided into four chapters: the oligotrophic stage, the mesotrophic stage, the eutrophic stage and the terrestrial stage.
In the beginning of a ponds life-cycle, a bare body of water is colonized by so called pioneer species. These species include algae and protozoans. At this stage the aquatic environment is mostly empty of nutritious and only species adapted enough to this environment find ways to survive. This nutrient low habitat is called oligotrophic. (Conti, 2025)
As more and more life settles in the pond, the nutrient levels rise and the pond transforms into its mesotrophic state. As nutrients rise, higher plants, such as pondweed, duckweed and other floating vegetation and filamentous algae, begin to transform the pond–accumulating nutrients and biomass (Conti, 2025). The more plants inhabitat the pond, the more animals are attracted to feed, find shelter and reproduce. (Missouri Botanical Garden, 2002) . These animals, again, feed the ecosystem with their biomass. Possible animals are insects, frogs, snails, birds and even small mammals. At this stage, a pond is describes as being in its eutrophic stage.
In the next stage the biomass of the inhabitants are starting to fill the floor with sediments–letting the pond become more shallow. Plants start to digg their roots into the floor of the pond, continuing this process. This process continues and finally the pond transform into marshy wetland, manifesting its terrestrial stage (Conti, 2025).
Watching a pond unfold, is watching it disappear. Although the process happens over more than a thousand years–outside of the frame of human observation–all actors in a pond eventually work towards the disappearance of their own species. The outcome is a process of continuous change, with a succession of species taking over the habitat of others. In an ecosystem only the species best adapted and specified to the conditions can settle and unfold. Meaning, when species change the conditions of the system, inhabitants are forced to adapt, or get extinct.
Looking upon the Storm Water Pond, we asked ourself how natural succession can be monitored in compressed time. Setting up a controlled habitat gives responsibility to the agent in control: How much shall be intervened? And how can be decided what species is aloud to live?
These existential questions followed us through the research presented in the following chapters.
Sources:
Drury, William H., and Ian C. T. Nisbet. “SUCCESSION.” Journal of the Arnold Arboretum 54, no. 3 (1973): 331–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43781773.
Biggs, Jeremy; Williams, Penny; Whitfield, Mericia; Nicolet, Pascale; Weatherby, Anita (2005). "15 years of pond assessment in Britain: results and lessons learned from the work of Pond Conservation". Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems. 15 (6): 693–714. doi:10.1002/aqc.745. ISSN 1052-7613.
Conti, Paul, 2025 https://www.solitudelakemanagement.com/the-stages-of-lake-and-pond-succession/ (01.02.2025)
Missouri Botanical Garden, 2002 https://www.mbgnet.net/fresh/lakes/success.htm (01.02.2025)