Today Vanessa VanHeerden and I found that there are micro-plastics in some of the sand samples from the Cook islands. We will be processing the rest of the 85 samples throughout the next month.
On another note: Under the advisement and guidance of Dr. Clare Wormald-Steele and Dr. Sean Anderson last week I started exposing the collected sample of sand crabs to micro plastic beads to see if they would ingest them. After 1 week the sand crabs were frozen and then dissected today. Vanessa VanHeerden and I found that over 80% of them had ambient fibers/plastics in their digestive tracts. 1 of the sand crabs that was exposed to micro plastic beads had 92 plastic microbeads inside of it. These are initial findings and we plan to investigate further.
