One of the major problems for long-term habitation of outer space is food production with minimal terrestrial inputs. Aquaculture provides a good option as it can be compact and high yielding. Various freshwater species such as tilapia and carp can be aquacultured at scale in very small footprints.

However, we believe that freshwater as a system is less reliable than saltwater in the long run. Firstly, many freshwater ecosystems are less diverse ecologically, which means on average there is less nutrient cycling and thus more ecologically inefficient. This is no surprise as the majority of freshwater ecosystems are either transient or between a source and the ocean that it eventually flows to, where most nutrient cycling actually occurs. There may be exceptions, but the general pattern holds. Secondly, freshwater organisms are significantly more prone to nitrite toxicity than saltwater. Any aquarist is aware of the nitrogen cycle, the dangers of ammonia and nitrite, and how easily the two can build up. In saltwater, chloride ions competitively inhibit nitrite uptake in fish, which results in orders of magnitude higher tolerance to nitrite than their freshwater counterparts. In a fault-intolerant environment like outer space, the repercussions of an aquarium crashing would be very high. Therefore, switching to a system that decreases the probability of this happening would yield a higher "expected value". Thirdly, freshwater ecosystems are much more prone to transmission of diseases to humans than saltwater ecosystems. This could be due to several reasons, but it is likely that freshwater organisms have evolved to thrive in conditions much more similar to human internal physiology than saltwater organisms have, with osmolarity being an obvious one. Likely as a result of this, it is a fact that empirically fewer marine pathogens infect humans than freshwater ones.

Due to these reasons, the founder of Decamicron Labs believes that the future of space travel will rely on saltwater-based aquaculture. However, much is still not understood about various aspects of water quality maintenance and ecological stability.

On the question of water quality, we believe that half of the problem has been largely solved by the SPS coral community regularly using ICP mass spectrometry to understand trace elements. Here "solved" just means that the social and scientific capacity required to rapidly develop the relevant technologies exists. This provides a case study of how one could leverage commercial avenues to answer pressing questions with societal impact.

Decamicron Labs aims to minimize the gap by characterizing the problems and developing in-house technologies to answer them. At the present moment, we believe the next two frontiers are dissolved organic matter and cryptic ecology.

Our philosophy stems from the observations:

1. Aquarium stores and aquaculture research are both capital intensive
2. Aquarium stores and aquaculture research require similar capital
3. Aquarium stores can be immediately profitable, but aquaculture research is not

By running an aquarium store and channeling profits towards R&D, we aim to develop the in-house know-how to eventually tackle questions related to aquaculture in space. We run several in-house programs, but currently our main guiding research questions are:

1. What organisms do we not want to maximize ecological efficiency?
2. What organisms do we want to maximize ecological efficiency?
3. How can we maximize ecological efficiency through abiotic means?

While these programs are not customer facing, they have tangentially led to cost reduction and quality improvements. Answering Question 1 has allowed us to develop our biggest differentiator: a very effective and robust prophylactic treatment and conditioning protocol that doesn't sacrifice quality. Questions 2 and 3 are guiding us toward a higher survival rate and fewer water changes, which means less labor required for each fish we carry. Besides rent and energy, the largest other running costs for an aquarium store are from labor and inventory loss. Every aquarium store will pass these costs onto you, whether or not the quality is actually better.

We stand behind every fish that we condition. In fact, we are so confident that we guarantee every fish will be eating at our facility before it ships, and we offer an extended guarantee that the fish will remain alive in your aquarium for some period of time.

Learn more about our conditioning protocol and our promises to you.