I found a lot of microplastics in my zooplankton samples and I'm wondering if that could be useful, or if the only way to quantify MP is manta net.
It appears that manta nets are intended to capture particles near the surface: https://aquaticbiotechnology.com/en/plankton-nets/manta-net Microplastics can be distributed throughout the rest of the water column as well, so it is not necessary to only examine the surface. For quantitative investigations, data is needed for the volume examined. Perhaps it would also be interesting to investigate the distribution of microplastics in different layers of the water column?
We did a preliminary comparison of microplastics with surface net tows vs vertical tows (bottom to surface) at a fixed station in the coastal waters of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, and found on average 2x more MPs in vertical net tow samples. Since we were studying MP ingestion by zooplankton throughout the water column, we decided to analyze samples collected via vertical net tows.
Depending on your research objectives, oblique net tows would collect MPs that are found throughout the water column/discrete depth ranges, taking into account MPs that float, sink and neutral buoyant due to differences in polymer densities, microorganism colonization, and hydrodynamic transport.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Correction