Written Element- Joshua Nunez

In this day of age, the spread of Microplastics have reached places far beyond where they were originally located. Usually, the spread of microplastics spread primarily to the ocean leaving around 8 million tons of plastic in the ocean every year. In a study a group conducted an autopsy on animals who died in unconventional ways and discovered that out of the thirteen animals eight of them had quantifiable levels of microplastics in them. All the animals that were caught were received via accidental catch by local fishermen which were then donated to the study.

As seen in the table below which may be hard to follow going from top to bottom a female otter who died by drowning has PS(polyesterne) in their tissue while three other male otters who also had the same cause of death had NT(No Trace) of microplastics in their tissue. Moving on wards two female sawbill ducks who died by drowning were found to have both PS and PVC(Polyvinyl Chloride) in their tissue. A female common guillemot was found to have PVC in their tissue but also PET(Polyethylene Terephthalate). Moving to the fish, two female cod which were caught had PVC and PS in their tissue. Another cod was caught but its gender was unknown which was caught as well only had traces of PVC in their tissue. Moving on to the flounder two were female and one was male all caught, only one female had traces of PVC in their tissue. 

This data is pretty alarming as a majority of the animals already had microplastics within them and being caught accidentally who knows how much they would be filled with microplastics if they died naturally. We have to also take into account the other animals that still might remain in the waters as other animals consume them to survive and so do we. 

Visual Element- Joshua Nunez