Can 3-D printing save homeless crabs?

[The Straight Story]

Can 3-D printing save homeless crabs?

It's not quite like knitting sweaters for penguins, but a new conservation project relies on similar crowd-sourced crafting to save another kind of sea creature. MakerBot Industries, a 3-D printer company in New York, wants help designing and producing plastic shells to fight homelessness among hermit crabs.

Called Project Shellter, the campaign was created to address a "housing shortage," its organizers say. Hermit crabs are born without shells and don't make their own, so they scavenge for empty ones — not just once, but every time they have a growth spurt.

They're resourceful when shells are scarce, often settling for things like beer bottles or shotgun shells. But those rarely make good substitutes for a seashell, and many wild hermit crabs now face a life-threatening lack of housing, according to Katherine Bulinski, a geoscientist at Bellarmine University who serves as Project Shellter's research adviser. The problem is partly due to people collecting abandoned shells from beaches, although much of the marine life that makes those calcium carbonate shells is also increasingly threatened by ocean acidification.

Where ecologists might see a quandary, though, MakerBot saw an opportunity. The company sells a 3-D printer called the Thing-O-Matic, which carves plastic models from digital, user-created blueprints. For Project Shellter, it's working with designer Miles Lightwood to crowd-source a variety of designs, hoping at least some will suit the crabs. Bulinski has said she initially considered distributing biodegradable plastic shells in the wild, but Lightwood tells MNN the goal for now "is to keep natural shells in the wild by creating a printable, crab-approved alternative for domestic use." The final material for those shells is yet to be determined, he adds, but biodegradable polyactic acid is being considered as well as traditional plastic.




http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/can-3-d-printing-save-homeless-crabs

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. Rec'd. Little idea, big ramifications.

The idea of designing for nature - man made designs that facilitate life for natural things as well as humans is the kind of stuff a beautiful future is made of.