Floating in Sky and Sea

In the laboratory, Dr. San-Li examined the mosquitoes they had caught through an X-ray camera. There had to be an answer as to why lots of insect-eaters were getting poisoned, if one of the prey happened to be affected, then whatever it was would enter the system of birds, amphibians, arachnids, reptiles, fish, and – if you included bats – mammals . . . so far as she knew, ten species of frogs, a dozen different lizards, and fish (both saltwater and freshwater, respectively) have been brought to her colleagues' care, all of them dying from, what she hypothesized, possibly the same source.

Twiddling the dial, she zoomed in on the pests feasting on a dish of blood, and something caught her attention: inside one of the mosquitoes' microscopic stomach, were tiny colourful grains . . . and curiously they resembled – plastic?

No, it couldn't be – it must be some sort of mistake – but wait; there were some more brightly-coloured grains inside another mosquito, and in another . . .

She paused her work and leaned back in her chair, thinking. Her children enjoy tearing apart Styrofoam containers and it resulted in a snowy mass needing vacuuming, something she detested doing so as it increases the number of microplastics in the world, and stopped buying anything in those polystyrene –

Microplastics!

Deciding to find out for herself, she carefully took out one mosquito and put it out of its misery before putting it into a sophisticated X-ray machine. If it were she had thought . . .

Meanwhile, Dr. Andrews was in the middle of studying water-born insects when he received a text from Dr. San-Li: Get a tank of mosquito larvae to my research lab, NOW! It's Urgent!

Perplexed by this request, Dr. Andrews took a tank of mosquito larvae and hurried to his friend's laboratory.

Inside, on the worktable sat jars filled with all sorts of powder, and when he drew closer, saw that they were in fact plastic.

"What's all this?" he asked, setting the tank down.

"I've found some micro-plastic inside some of my mozzies," she explained. "Since plastic pollution is ubiquitous, especially in water, animals living in and around aquatic habitats can swallow small bits of it by mistake, but plastic's impact might spread further by the food-chain."

Dr. San-Li began her test, feeding the 100 larvae with food mixed with microplastics. Next, aided by time, she examined 15 individuals at a time, all the way to when they became fliers. After some months, she got the results: she and Dr. Andrews had found microplastics in 30 of them; there was more than 3,000 microplastics in each larvae and as they grew, they gradually stopped eating them – even so, about 40 bits still remained in the adults' stomachs after excreting lots of it.

This explained why some of the creatures – land and sea – in her colleagues' care had died during her research; they had consumed the plastics through the mosquitoes. The floating microplastic carriers.