I'm writing a project about plastic ingestion by fish, and one of my goals it's to asses if invertebrates can indicate a source of plastic to invertivorous fish. My initial thoughts were: if fish were found ingesting plastic, and the invertebrates that these fish consumed were also found with plastic, how can I statistically test this relationship. A correlation doesn't seem fit to answer this question.
Can you give some more information about potential experimental setup? In open populations this would likely be hard without some evidence of specific prey consumption. But if you have populations of fish that are roughly "independent" (i.e. fish in different lakes, distant stream/river segments, or independent streams) and the insects have different levels of plastic present a reasonable experimental setup should be possible.
@Matt Weldy
I didn't think about this as an experimental setup. My data would be the abudance of plastic in the fish, and the abundance in the invertebrates. Both I collected in a connected lake. For example, if a fish consumed a great amount of a "X" invertebrate, and also had a great amount of plastic in its stomach, and this same invertebraye were found having plastic, is there a way to test it, and say there's a relationship ?
Without independent replicates, inference from your 'abundance' data (I assume mass) will be quite limited. However, you could demonstrate correlations between consumption of invertebrate X and the amount of content in an individual fish stomach with a regression analysis, which could guide future research projects with experimental setups that allow for more clear testing of this hypothesis.
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