Plastics, Tapir toys, & Macrame at DiNaLab

Adventures in craft and wildlife.

After teaching the Materials of Electronics class at CIID, I returned with Andy and Kitty to Gamboa, Panama, to visit the Digital Naturalism Laboratories for 5 days.

🏗 The space

Getting a tour of the lab was so inspiring! The space has everything you need for building, crafting, and hacking. There are pegboards with tools and materials everywhere - meaning that just about anything you need is within reach.

The place is decorated with DIY projects and objects crafted by friends and family. The vibe was cozy and welcoming, and I felt all sorts of creative juices flowing 🍍

♻️ Recycling plastics

Kitty was working on fusing some LDPE (♶) together. The current iteration for fusing involves making multiple thick sheets in the panini press in between teflon baking paper. The sheets are made out of layers of plastic sandwich bags, bottle caps, and other LDPE material.

🦉 Owl earrings

These are earrings of Búho de Anteojos (Spectacled Owl), a local of Panama and a common owl found throughout Central America and parts of South America.

I stan owls, so I had to contribute one to the DiNaLab arte reciclado collection.

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🧵 Macrame

I look at plastics so differently now after my visit to DiNaLab! These plant holders that Kitty made are made out of plastic yarn, shredded from plastic bags. It struck me that these macrame plant holders made plastic bags look nice, even taking advantage of certain labels to make interesting textures. The hooks on the plant holders are cut from the recycled plastic sheets like Kitty was working on earlier.

🌉 Repairing Frijolito Bridge

The pipeline path is one of the main trails that naturalists use to conduct studies of different species in the wild. Going there requires hardy shoes like rubber boots and if you’d like to transport yourself faster, four wheel drive.

The trail used to be maintained by the Smithsonian, but these days guerrilla maintenance usually keeps things together. Andrew Coates tells us that these bridges were made by the US civil engineering department when these trails used to be a two lane highway. The iron construction is sound, but over time the wooden boards on top have begun to rot. One of the boards had actually come loose, and so we joined Andrew in helping to bolt the board back down.

🐾 Animal enrichment

Tapirs are endangered species that roam about the forests of Central & South America (genus: Tapirus) and Southeast Asia (Acrocodia). The APPC received Valencia when she was a baby after her mother was hunted & killed. In the wild, tapirs have plenty of space to play and forage for leaves, fruits, and berries, but in captivity, there’s much less environmental stimulation.

To provide enrichment for Valencia, DiNaLab and APPC built toys that turned mealtime into a treasure hunt. These toys were fashioned out of tree stumps, bamboo, and zip ties, but Valencia determinedly ate through the soft material. My visit lined up with DiNaLab's next iteration for a toy made out of steel. Andy had found a metal pipe that we turned into a “sculptural form” that we could hang fruits and vegetation on.