Continued Progress

We planted more mangroves at Royal Maya Shrimp Farm last Saturday and had quite a good time (despite the heat).

There were no crocs, but we did find some footprints.

I will be visiting Urbana in about a week and need to know how many Aquamats to bring and what type. I saw that almost 40% of the Uni student body is sick with H1N1 or other sicknesses (Yikes! Who knew coming to the US could be so risky?). In any case, I would fly into hades if necessary to see the state cross country finals, so I'll be there. Tell me a good date between the 6th and 12th if you want to meet.

Here's a quick update on the use of the site. We're well over 3,200 hits (not quite the 6,000 I mis-remembered during our Uni meeting last month). Unfortunately, I was also a bit lax keeping up with all the countries who monitored our site over the summer so these stats will be a bit under-represented. Looking back through September and October and the countries we had already logged, it appears we have at least 44 different nations checking in on us. Those include:

Abu Dhabi
Argentina
Australia
Belize
Brazil
Brunei
Canada
Cayman Islands
China
Columbia
Costa Rica
Croatia
Czechoslovakia
Dubai
Ecuador
England
France
Germany
Guatemala
Honduras
India
Indonesia
Italy
Jamaica
Laos
Malaysia
Netherlands
Pakistan
Philipenes
Poland
Portugal
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
Slovakia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkey
United States
Vietnam

November 22, 2009 edit to add:

Albania
Hungary
Iran
Lithuania
Portugal
Romania
Virgin Islands

Nice!

Good luck as you work on designs!

Aquamats Get Wet and Welcome Abigail Parham

First we stopped by the sedimentation pond at Aquamar Shrimp Farm that Adolpho has just finished rehabilitating.

You can see the deeper canal on the near bank where water enters the pond. This is where we will be deploying Aquamats. On the far bank is a footing that directs the channeled water into the shallow center area before it exits at the control structure on the back right part of the photo. There are also few shallow partitions in the deeper channel for planting mangrove strips.

The pond looks terrific and should be a terrific place to trap sediments and test the Aquamats. Thank you Adolpho!

Then Adrian and Wilbur and I loaded up 75 Aquamats (you can get an idea from this photo about the size of 75 mats) and took them down to the pond...

...where we will be using 3 types of Aquamats. The specifications for each type are listed in an earlier post. Capped PVC pipes were inserted through the sleeve at one end. The blue Aquamats with narrow strips float, the green Aquamats with thicker strips float, and white ones with heavy thick strips sink. We have plenty of all three types. The PVC for the floating type will need to be weighted with sand to sink the sleeve and allow the strips to float up from the bottom.

I will bring a few Aquamats back to Illinois in November for the group to use for the experiments. We should discuss what type to bring.

After rounding up the Aquamats, we headed over Independence Jr. College where we met with Abigail Parham, environmental biology instructor. Abigail will be coordinating the interns who will test the Inventeams prototype during winter 2010.

Welcome, Abigail!

Inventor's Club Wins Lemelson-MIT Inventeams Grant

Congratulations to all the University High School Inventor's Club members for winning a Lemelson-MIT Inventeams Grant. You should definitely be proud. These prestigious awards only went out to 15 schools around the country. People in the Placencia area were excited to hear the news. I got this note from Alvin Henderson, co-owner of the Royal Maya Shrimp Farm.

"...Congratulations on winning the Lemelson-MIT grant for the algae recycling prototype! We have seen the encouraging results of the mangrove planting initiatives and hope that this new programme will meet with similar success.

Best regards,

Alvin"


The agenda for the next 8 months looks like this:

October 2009-January 2010: develop the prototype in Illinois

January 2009-May 2010: test the prototype in cooperation with Independence Jr. College at local shrimp farms

June 2010: Present results at the Inventeams conference in Boston

Time to get busy!

Wilbur's First Day

Here's a brief photo essay showing Wilbur Dubon's first day as an environmental intern.



We had a little mangrove planting in mind for an erosion control project. Adrian, Wilbur and I went out to gather mangrove propagules.

Mangrove propagules are pretty easy to get right now and we had 1,500 in about 45 minutes.

A test plot from last year had shown good promise for sediment retention.

Adrian showed Wilbur the finer points of propagule planting....

...and despite the rain and heat, Wilbur was off to the races.

1500 mangrove propagules are now in place to slow erosion and provide habitat.

That's a great first day. Well done Mr. Dubon!

An invigorating meeting

The Uni High Inventor's Club (plus one very cute 5 year old) met today to discuss designs for the algae recycling prototype. Multiple designs are being considered and they all show promise.

Keep an eye on the blog in days to come. Great things are happening!