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3D Printers To Save Hermit Crabs
Shareable writes "Makerbot just launched Project Shellter, which will leverage the Makerbot community's network of 5,000 3D printers to make shells for hermit crabs — which face a species-threatening, man-made shell shortage (they inhabit abandoned shells)."
By printing more suckers.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Perhaps it could be named "Project bash"?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Is there any evidence that this is a real problem, as opposed to an art project, PR stunt, or whatever?
One of the challenges is that no one knows yet if hermit crabs will live in man-made plastic shells.
But hey so long as we can sell 5000 people more plastic filament replacements who cares, it's for a good cause, right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
from the article: "But, a thought - how about we stop destroying hermit crab homes in the first place? Isn't putting too much plastic stuff in the ocean part of the problem? "
Is plastic (ABS) the only thing a Makerbot can work with?
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
man-made shell shortage (they inhabit abandoned shells)
Well, that explains where my Thompson shell went...
*this space intentionally left blank
"One of the four pointers saying 'come and see', and I saw, and beheld a white
I don't know about anywhere else but, the hermit crabs out here aren't hurting for shells. The problem should be even worse as they are in competition with young coconut crabs too.
goatse - someone mod this troll down, please.
GOATSE, DO NOT CLICK
FTFA:
With a shell shortage, hermit crabs around the world are being forced to stick their butts into bottles, shotgun shells, and anything else they can find.
I keep tellin' them pesky neighborhood ranch association folks that it ain't no trash in my front yard. That there's a Hermit Crab Sanctuary.
And them crabs keeps their kids off my lawn.
At least I think there's still a lawn down there below the trash.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Oh man, what a weak troll.
The strength of makerbot is that lets people be creative, make things, and share their stuff. Mass producing something by telling everybody to make the same thing is counterproductive. Use molds or something if you want mass production, it will probably cost less when you look at the energy bill anyway.
Crabs have better lobbyists.
rewriting history since 2109
Goatcx link
I can't seem to find any scholarly source that would say they(hermit crabs) are actually short on shells...
also, it appears the shit they are proposing to use can be harmful to albatrosses.
But this probably takes the cake.
I have to hope this is just a (lame) attempt at advertising, and not that the dimwits involved in this actually believe that its better for the hermit crabs to ship plastic around the world, manufacture it into the spools the MakerBot uses, then use all that electricity to fabricate a plastic shell, and then tossing *plastic* into the ocean is actually going to help hermit crabs.
You know, hermit crabs -- an animal of which there are billions in the ocean. (I'm sure a few thousand suckers making these will really help the species!)
You know, an animal that will live in ANY scavanged hollow-enough item.
And if said dimwits actually believe they're helping anything, it just goes to show the aversion to reason and science isn't limited to the radical right.
Phew, thanks, he nearly got me, I had the tab open even.
I was wondering what 3D printing project would cost 3 or 4 digits in materials. I figured it would be some huge thing constructed from 3D printed modules.
On the other hand a $12k printer is always a possibility and I wanted to see this huge and awesome machine (which was in fact, goatse's butt).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...Why not Zoidberg?
(especially since the episode where Zoidberg finds a shell has some of the best quick gags in the series.)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I'm going to print the worlds smallest violin and play it just for you, troll.
There are plenty of plastic objects in the sea causing a lot of problems for the sea-living animals and I don't think we need to add to these problems. Check out the following video:
Chris Jordan on the Midway Project
Scroll down past the article, there's more insight in the comments than the actual story. Makes you wonder if anyone really thought about the impact of 5000+ pieces of plastic going into the ocean hoping that these crabs take shelter... I really hope they have some more in depth research other than, "our pet hermit crab loves them!" There must be a reason glass blowers across the US haven't tackled this yet.
3D printers being used to craft weighted shoes for hermit crabs found floating in tidal pools due to plastic shells.
Has any stopped to think that these plastic shells will be just as much a novelty to collect on the shore? I'd want one.
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This was tried in 2004 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/demaray.php
TFA goes into detail on the reasons and shows actual experiments with prototypes.
Is there any evidence that this is a real problem, as opposed to an art project, PR stunt, or whatever?
yes the evidence is it would be much much cheaper to make hermit crab shells by almost any method besides 3D printing. It's a stunt.
Going to public beaches in the US, it may be difficult to appreciate just how much this species has been depleted. For all of the years of going on vacation at US beaches, I only ever saw one hermit crab, the size of a pea. Last year we went to Costa Rica, and it was the same story on public beaches there. No hermit crabs to be found. Not even many intact shells to be found. When we went to a protected national park, however, it was a different story. You stepped onto the beach and the beach was running away from you. It was impossible to find an unoccupied, intact shell. There were easily ten or more hermit crabs per square foot.
I suspect that that's what US beaches would be like if there were homes for hermit crabs available on the beaches. Just because you've never seen them in the wild, it's easy to assume that they're rare or don't belong there. In fact, the case is that these critters are already massively depleted!
Shame that i can't upload videos to these retorts. I have a definite answer to whether the crabs accept plastic, with a couple of crabs, filmed here in okinawa, where they seem quite content to inhabit the bottlenecks of pet bottles. Plastic surely works.
The funny thing is that there is no shortage of real shells here.
Cozy plastic.
If were as simple as printing off some shells to save the species that marine biologists could phone an order to China and have a boxes of these things shipped to their door for a reasonable sum. I'm also fairly certain that there must be hundreds of potentially viable containers / shell substitutes in common use which could be collected by kids and tipped over the side into the sea without any further manufacturing effort. Look how many vials, bottles and tubs humans produce and it's not hard to see how many could be suitable for crabs.
Please just read them and then you realize this is a terrible solution to a non-existant problem.
I read this on another site, and it might put to rest some of the "toxic plastic" concerns:
"Most likely they'd use PLA, polylactic acid plastic. Made from corn starch, tapioca, or sugarcane, and it biodegrades. Like half the Makerbot stuff uses PLA, it's got a very low melting point and runs faster than ABS."
Why not invest a little money in the hard tooling to make a lot of these things and stamp them out in volume. These 3D printers are suited for one-off designs, not for mass fabrication of large quantities of the same thing.
However, putting together a fundraiser to pay for high volumes of what the hermit crabs actually need won't get the hype and eyespace that this project will. Nor will it sell more stuff to a demographic with a significant disposable income.
I had a professor that tried this for her studies awhile ago. It was a complete failure. She could not get hermits to prefrence the fab over the natural. She tried many types of printers and processes with exact replicas of the shells the crabs were
preferencing without luck. She put it down to the chemicals, weight and the lack of smoothness/comfort compared to mother of pearl.
So I question the success rate of the mbots