Patterns of suspended and salp-ingested microplastic debris in the North Pacific investigated with epifluorescence microscopy
This manuscript encompasses the second and third chapter of my PhD. I developed a new method for quantifying the smallest microplastics in seawater, that had previously been vastly undercounted, and discovered that there were 5-7 orders of magnitude more microplastics in the ocean than previous estimates thought. I also counted this tiny microplastics in the stomachs of filter-feeding zooplankton called salps, that are at the bottom of the oceanic food chain.