9mo ago

These Scientists Tested Dolphin Breath. They Found Plastic. | Researchers studying bottlenose dolphins found polyester and other plastics in every animal they tested.

www.nytimes.com

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9mo ago

www.nytimes.com /2024/10/16/climate/dolphin-plastic-breath.html

21 comments

This is so depressing.
Plastic is going to be the next leaded gasoline
- Oh it's way worse than that. I would say it's so bad that: "it's as bad as plastic" is gonna be the comparison for everything that is horrible in the future.
- Like leaded gasoline made people criminals and murderers and domestic violence, and violent gangs and mayhem? Microplastics are having this effect on dolphins now?
  
  The absolutely terrifying thing is that we have no real idea what the health effects will be. Hope it’s not cancer!
Plastic bottlenose dolphins.
- New Gorillaz album
At least we stopped putting them in our tuna....
Man, we are so fucked.
When they leave they’re not even gonna thank us for the fish
Well sure, pre-packaging them makes it easier to get them into the tuna cans.
They're finding plastics everywhere like a quack doctor finds Lyme disease.
- This is the lead author of the study:
  Miranda K. Dziobak
  Roles: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft
  Affiliations: Department of Health and Human Performance, School of Health Sciences, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, United States of America, Department of Environmental Health Sciences, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States of America
  That doesn't sound like a quack to me.
  You can feel free to check on the legitimacy of the multiple other authors in the peer-reviewed study too:
  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/authors?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0309377
  
  Obviously, I provided no evidence of my contention. Nor did I intend to. But there is plenty of crap published in peer-reviewed journals, and quacks all graduated from medical school.
  I made no good argument at all, so it takes nothing to counter it. But an argument from authority is still a bad counterargument.
- you're probably wearing a bunch of it
- My parent comment is so downvoted that it's unlikely many will see this.
  I am a scientist by training and am inherently skeptical of many scientific studies. Science progresses through the accumulation of many results and the survival of models which explains them. Individual papers mean little but will contribute toward the broader understanding only if they are corroborated over time.
  I made a flippant remark about this paper because I am suspicious of the team reporting to find plastics everywhere. Since I made a stink, I bothered to look into the paper. The study is only slightly shoddy. The conclusion that plastics were found in all samples would be better stated as "found at levels higher than the blanks." They found plastics in every field blank tested (Table 1) and especially for the second location where they used a more sophisticated device than Petri dishes.
  I think Table 2 is slightly off because they subtracted the plastic count from the blanks, but they didn't put in negative counts when the blanks were higher. For example, at the first location there were as many blue plastics in total in the blanks as in the test samples. But they cited a net 1 in the tests because that corresponding blank didn't have blue plastic. That seems invalid because they aren't accounting for the noise in detecting 0-3 pieces randomly across all samples if it is coming from environmental or lab contamination.
  Also, fume hoods don't keep contaminants out of the samples. They keep samples out of the rest of the lab.
  Overall, there were more plastic pieces in the blowhole samples than the field blanks. There's something to it. Is it actually relevant to animal health? TBD.

21 comments