Hey there again. I am going to be doing my independent research project (IRP) on micro plastics in oysters. My scientific question is, are there micro plastics in oysters? What my thinking on this is, if there are micro-plastics in oysters, then they aren't filtering the water that they should be and that's not a good thing. Oysters that are healthy are supposed to filter up to 50 gallons of water each day. That doesn't sound like much but that is PER oyster and there can be literally thousands of oysters on one oyster bed. With as dirty as the Indian River Lagoon has been over the past years, are micro plastics a contributing factor of it staying dirty?
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| Indian River Lagoon Oysters |
After doing a quick search on micro plastics in oysters, I found some research that has been done on the Pacific oyster, and the results are scary. It shows that the oysters have had a decrease in reproduction, smaller offspring and feeding modifications.
After reading that article I'm even more excited to get out and do some research in our backyard. If my results turn out that there are micro plastics in our lagoon system, hopefully we caught it soon enough to get a plan to help clean the waters.The picture to the right is a picture of an oyster bed in the Indian River Lagoon.
If you would like to see more of the research that was done on the Pacific oysters, I have included the link below.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780615/
Exciting research! My initial question to you is based on your statement "...they aren't filtering the water that they should be..." what do you mean by this?
ReplyDeleteIf they do contain micro plastics, they may not be able to filter water like an oyster that does not have micro plastics in it.
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