Morris Island Boat Tour: Plastic Summit Kick-off

On March 29th I attended the Morris Island Boat Tour, also on the cruise was fellow EBSP turtle volunteers Craig & Nona. The tour left from the Charleston Water Taxi, who donated the use of their boat, residing next to the South Carolina Aquarium. We made the cruise to Morris Island an uninhabited landmass, often used as a party location for boaters. During the boat ride, there were several speakers, including Dr. Barbara Beckingham, who is an assistant professor at the College of Charleston, who brought to light the amount of microplastics in our water, including the Charleston Harbour. Then Barent Roth, of The New School of New York City, who spoke about the microplastic skimmers that can be made to test for microplastics in the water. A good majority of microplastics will be near the surface of the water on a calm day. We pulled two skimmers beside the boat as we made our way to the island but it was a fairly windy and choppy day so we didn’t discover many plastics as we were also only testing by what we could see without a microscope. Microplastics range from anything less than 5mm in length.
 
There was a study done on the fish and microplastics in the Charleston Harbour and it was found that 32 out of 35 fish species had some amount of microplastics in their gut, that number shocked everyone!
 
Prior to our arrival on the island we celebrated the launch of the new SCAquarium app to track garbage through the site anecdata.org. Created by the MDI Biological Laboratory, Anecdata.org is an online citizen science community that hosts many different citizen science projects from around the world including the project by the South Carolina Aquarium.
 
When we arrived to Morris Island we grabbed one bag for garbage and the other for recyclable material and used the app to track the amount of trash we picked up. We discovered a lot of Styrofoam in varying sizes, beer cans, glass bottles, plastic bags, rope, etc.
 
It was a great day to be on a boat cruise while hearing from experts in the field, all while picking up garbage to help clean up Morris Island and kick-off the SCAquarium app and the 2017 Plastic Summit.