The probe arrives!

The WWF water quality probe finally cleared all the hurdles at customs and arrived in Placencia this week. Representatives from the Central American and Belizean offices of WWF arrived to install the In Situ Troll. They're pictured below with captain and community researcher Adrian Vernon, consultants from Adcon Corporation (the company handling the satellite uplink), In Situ (the water quality probe manufacturer) and Rachel Carrie, a graduate student working with Xac Che, a group doing watershed work in southern Belize.



Here we are all heading out to the installation site.

Here Jon Thomas of In Situ demonstrates how to calibrate the water quality probe as Kendrick Gordon of Belize Department of Environment (left) and Jose Vasquez of WWF (on the right) look on.



Arnold Lara of Adcon works on the satellite uplink as community researcher as WWF representative Mauricio Mejia looks on.

And the finished system is ready to roll. We'll be watching the probe over the next few weeks and documenting the effects of efforts to improve water quality at the farms.

Progress!!

More Sedimentation Ponds for AquaMats

One of the tasks of my current project is to reduce nutrient inputs from shrimp ponds to the local environment. As we have discussed, one of the ways that is done is by constructing sedimentation ponds. These, intuitively enough, trap sediment and nutrients attached to sediments. Eventually these ponds fill and need rehabilitation.

Thanks to some help from AquaMar Shrimp Farm, we will be able to use Aquamats in a freshly re-dug pond.

Meet Adolpho.

Adolpho operates a dredge at the farm. He will be creating deep areas along the sides of this sedimentation pond where our AquaMats can be deployed.

Presently, the pond has filled in from years of use. The trees you see growing in it are white mangroves.

Here you can see the layers of sediment that have been trapped in the pond over the years of use.

Adolpho will not only be scraping out some of that sediment, he will also be creating small, separate catchment areas inside the sedimentation pond that we can use to test the efficacy of the Aquamats as nutrient traps.

Once the Inventor's club substrate and biofilm removal system is in place, they could be deployed in those catchment areas as well.

Many thanks to Adolpho, AquaMar farm manager Linda Thorton and owner Mike Dunker for all their support.