Angela - Marineland + Mistake

After finding a multitude of washed up garbage and plastic at Fernandina Beach (see previous post titled "Plastic Jackpot"), I figured I was in fact on to something and Florida's east coast does have more plastic content-possibly due to the North Atlantic Garbage Patch- than the west coast.

However, my next stop on the east coast, on October 6th, 2013, was disappointingly clean and beautiful. On the other beaches I noticed each being used as a giant ashtray; Marineland's beach had ONE cigarette butt!

During my visual survey I came across one plastic bottle, about 12 inches long, made of dense looking blue plastic, that had what looked like bivalves growing on it but hermit crabs seemed to live in them:

Back on Fernandina beach I had decided to change my procedure a little bit. The first time I went out for samples (see blog entry on "Realization: Maybe lab work would suit me best"), I took down the GPS coordinates of every sample I scooped, however, all of it ends up mixed up in the same jar and the instrument I am using has around a 20 foot error. 

Instead, I now take down the starting and ending GPS coordinates, and changed my sampling parameters to the following "whichever comes first" limits:

- 1 hour

- 1/2 mile

- Filled 2 quart jar

Ultimately I only took surface sediment samples from Marineland's beach, however, in hindsight, since that dense looking blue bottle was too big for my jar, not taking it home with me might come back to haunt me. Originally I had planned on tracking the number of plastic pieces found in each location, which is technically at this point 1 piece for Marineland' beach, however, if it turns out I have a handful (hundreds) of microbeads in my sample it would probably be easier to quantify my plastic findings by weight instead of number of pieces.