Bubbles on Aquarium Glass – P365 Jan13

When I don’t clean the glass of our tank often enough, the algae grows and eventually starts producing these bubbles. The furyness you can see in the second photo is the algae, and they produce the gas bubbles as a by-product of their metabolism. The bubbles average about 1mm across.

The cool thing is, this is exactly the process that gave us the nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere the Earth has today, and allowed all larger life forms to evolve. I reckon it’s so cool to be able to see a billion year old chemical process, that gave birth to all macroscopic life on Earth, right on the glass of our aquarium :)