Microplastic Research Paper

954 Words4 Pages

Thesis Proposal
1. Introduction
In contemporary society, plastics are widely used in people’s daily life, the annual production of plastic has a significant increase from 1.5 million to around 280 million during the 1950s and 2011 (PlasticsEurope, 2012). Plastic has become one of the major contaminants which are widespread in the environment (Moore, 2008; Thompson et al., 2009). Plastics are made of polymerisation of monomers (Derraik, 2002, Rios et al., 2007 and Thompson et al., 2009b). According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), microplastics are plastics which are smaller than 5mm. There are two types of the microplastics in the environment based on the origin. One is primary microplastics and another is secondary …show more content…

It has been reported that bioaccumulation and biomagnification of plastic could happen in the food web (The physical impacts of microplastics on marine organisms: A review). Many small organisms at low trophic level such as suspension, filter and deposit feeders, detritivores and planktivores can ingest microplastics (Browne et al., 2008; Graham and Thompson, 2009; Murray and Cowie, 2011; Thompson et al., 2004), which would cause physical threat. Predation of microplastic-contaminated organisms cause the transfer of microplastics through the food chain. Microplastics would block or scratch the digestive system, interfere the production of enzyme; dilute nutrient; reduce growth rates; delay ovulation and reproductive failure and so on. (Galgani et al., …show more content…

At each temperature, three experiment groups are set. Same gut fluid is used in all the experiment. In the first group, clean zooplankton and contaminated PE are put into gut fluid. In the second group, both PE and zooplanktons are contaminated. In the third group, clean PE and contaminated zooplanktons are added into gut fluid. Before adding PE particles and zooplanktons, gut fluid should be put into the incubator to reach the experimental temperature. After putting plastics and zooplanktons, the experiment groups should be put into incubators at experimental temperature in dark. PE samples should take from gut fluid at 10 time points. The samples are taken in

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