The container has but a couple holes in it, one for the water to drain out, six for fly's to get in and lay eggs, and one with a pipe leading to the harvesting bucket. The image to the left shows the incubator minus the lid. This was the plan.The reality has been that some of the information I read about the maggots ability to climb may have been incorrect. The ramp leading up to the collection hole should have been the easiest way for the little buggers to leave the unit but instead they chose to climb the vertical walls and pile up by the seal. This resulted in maggots getting out every time I opened the door. Not a god situation when you are trying to harvest them.
Plan B has been to switch over to five gallon buckets and a water drowning method for dealing with them after they crawl over the top lip and drop. The good news is that I haven't made anyone throw up this time so the process is improving! There may be a few more revisions of the system before it becomes fully functional. Students start feeding them to the little fish tomorrow.
Speaking of the little tilapia, I have had several days of research class so far and the students have been hard at work designing and constructing our experimental unit. We have twelve Brute totes inside of a pair of larger trough tanks as the basic design. Each tote has twenty fish in it and these will be the lucky fish chosen for the grand experiment. The image to the left is of the students and me putting the frame together to hold the tanks and walkway. The pair of tanks is designed to have water pumped into it from the main tilapia water system and it also gravity drains back into the regular system acting like any other tank in the system. Today we put a bird tent over the whole experiment due to the presence of a fish loving green heron that has appeared. I will post pictures when I get them off of Andrea's camera.
Along with the research class I am teaching I have been helping with the human ecology class that Remo is doing. Basically he wants the students to study the interaction between people and place. Since I am in charge or growing food here on the campus I have been getting the student hands on with all of our food systems so they can understand the difficulties of growing in this climate. Since the majority of our food is imported Remo and I feel that the students needed to understand why this is. I am done with that part of the class now as the students move on to other experiences like fishing with a local fisherman for a day, farming with a slash and burn farmer, and going to the mailboat to see our food arrive.
The two main activities I had the students work on were fish sampling and planting in the orchard. The first image is of the sampling process. Fifty fish are removed from one of the tanks and placed into a cooler with water. After they are all netted up they are removed one-by-one, weighed, measured, and returned to the original tank. This process is done once a month to track their growth and adjust feed rates accordingly.
The next image is of th
e hole the students dug in order to plant a new sugar apple out of the nursery. This is simply a hole in the ground about three feet in diameter and a foot and a half deep. Simple rig
ht? This was a two hour process involving six high schoolers, two pick axes, and five shovels. After the hole is prepped we placed three layers of cardboard in the bottom of the pit to help keep the nutrients from washing out of the soil. This was then covered with a sand, compost, wood shaving, and dirt mixture. The tree is set into this bed slightly recessed into the ground. This allows the water to pool near the tree instead of running away from it and also allows for a layer of mulch to be placed around the base of the tree. We used casuarina wood shavings as a mulch, six inches thick worth of it. Below is a picture 
of the finished tree planting.The other student groups I had in the orchard propogated some eddible plants for all to enjoy in a couple of years. We used our waste milk containers cut in half as starting pots. This involved the students cutting through fifty containers with sour milk residue inside, filling it with potting soil that they had to sift the stones and sticks out of, and taking the clippings. A fun afternoon activity. Picture above is of the sifting process with the reclaimed containers below.
That's all for now, I think I have talked long enough.
Joshua
How is the maggot harvesting going, have you managed to tame the escapees? or at least restrict them? Has the fate of the Cape been left to become over run my a giant maggot takeover!?
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