SandCrabs and Micro Plastics/Fibers
As of Friday I was able to get 31 sand crabs dissected and 20 of them had ambient fibers in their stomach content or surrounding tissues. That is approximately 64% of the sandcrabs so far have ambient fibers. Since the data from the summer research institute shows that a high percentage of the beaches sampled also had fibers and micro plastics, I hypothesize I will continue to find microfibers in the sand crabs.
Over the weekend I was able to travel north to San Louis Obispo county and collect 35 more crabs from 3 different sites as well as sand samples to process. Hopefully my contacts in Orange county, Santa Cruz and San Francisco will come thru with more sand crabs and sand samples as well. I am hoping to get a wide geographic range in sampling to see what I find.
Once the collected crabs are dissected I plan to test a hypothesis that the sand crabs will ingest micro plastics by sequestering them into small jars with sea water and exposing them to plastic microbeads I have filtered out of a face soap product that will be on the “to be banned” list if legislation is passed.
