[Coral-List] help survey marine debris: call to designers and engineers

[Nicole Chatterson]

This is a call to industrial designers, engineers and the likes who are
interested in the issue of marine pollution.

A marine research based non-profit called Sea of Change, located in Hawai'i,
is looking for some help designing an oceanic surface trawl to study
micro-marine debris.  The challenge is that we would like the trawl to have
the following characteristics:
1) light-weight
2) compact
3) high-speed
4)low production cost
5) ideally using sustainable materials (i.e. little or no plastics other
than the fibers used to construct the netting)

The idea is that these surface trawls (aka Manta trawls) will be distributed
to boaters acting as "volunteer citizen scientists" to gather data for the
scientific community at large on marine debris density.  We will eventually
incorporate this information into a database to be used by the research
community at large.

The idea is that this could become a competition within a class of
industrial design/engineering students.  Alternatively, perhaps a graduate
student would like to take on this project as a thesis or upper-division
project.

Please feel free to forward this to potentially interested parties.

Contact Nicole, nikki2244 at gmail.com, to get involved.  We are willing to
take suggestions on the structure of this program and are remaining flexible
and open to new ideas and ways to collaborate.

Cheers,

Nicole Chatterson

Project Manager, Sea of Change