Students remove the screens covering the 100-gallon tubs to identify macroinvertebrates and any microplastics that might have clumped together in the tubs.
Six students from Gonzaga University's biology department are researching microplastics at Turnbull Wildlife Refuge. From left are Kate Swyers, Emma Gashi, Jimmy Barone, Kaitlyn Palacio, Gracie McRae and Zoe Driml.
CHENEY- As part of their summer research work, six students from Gonzaga University's (GU) biology department have been out and about in the Turnbull Wildlife Refuge to try and find out how microplastics affect aquatic communities.
The students work in a section of Eastern Washington University's (EWU) field station known as the Turnbull Laboratory for Ecological Studies. Part of their research is at a pond inside Turnbull.
Kaitlyn Palacio and Gracie McRae came up with the idea. The two lead the project.
"We've been working with microplastics in the lab and we were looking for something more hands-on," Palacio said. "Most work during the school year is observational."
For this project, there are 30 small aquatic communities called mesocosms created in 100-gallon plastic tubs.
Ten tubs have zero microplastics added and ten have 30 microplastics per liter added. The remaining 10 have 60 microplastics per liter.
"There are 30 mesocosms using water from the pond," Palacio said. "We siphoned water into each of them and filled them three quarters of the way. Then we supplemented them using plankton tow nets."
Plankton tow nets allowed student researchers to gather aquatic animals and add them to tanks, creating their mesocosms.
After setting up the mesocosm tubs, students introduced microplastics to the aquatic communities existing in those tubs.
The lab visits Turnbull once a week to see how aquatic life interacts with the microplastics.
"When we go out now, we're looking for bigger macroinvertebrates and identifying what we can see," McRae said. "We put screens on top of the tanks so the communities in the mesocosms are only from what we got out of the pond."
Betsy Bancroft, associate professor in the Department of Biology and the Department of Environmental Studies & Science, said the students who came up with the idea for this research wanted something that mattered locally.
"The students designed and did all the work to create this project," Bancroft said. "Their question is how do microplastic fibers affect the small pieces of aquatic communities - zooplankton all the way up to things like the aquatic stage of various insects called macroinvertebrates."
Bancroft said research on microplastics in aquatic systems has unrealistic levels of microplastics. Meaning the study doesn't reflect what exists in nature.
There is too high of a concentration of microplastics, or the types of microplastics are not used.
"For this project, the students wanted to test realistic impacts of microplastics in these biotic communities to try to understand how big of a problem these microplastics represent," she said. "Are they causing problems, or are they not causing problems at the levels we currently see them? At the end, they'll look to see how the tubs changed over time and if there are differences between tanks that have microplastics and the tanks that don't have microplastics."
Michaela is a former newsroom intern at the Cheney Free Press. She covered stories on education, city government, cops/courts/fire departments and local businesses.
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