The river of plastic with Mark Benfield
We are surrounded by single-use plastic. We dispose of plastic bags, water bottles, and coffee stirrers quickly after their uses, yet their existence remains. These persistent plastics find their way into our waterways, leaching toxic chemicals and breaking down into smaller and smaller microscopic pieces, eventually corrupting the entire food web. Dr. Mark Benfield with the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences in the College of Coast & Environment shares his recent research on microplastics in the Mississippi River, which may soon be known as the river of plastic. (Transcript below.)
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Transcript
Becky Carmichael
[0:00] This is Experimental, where we explore exciting research occurring at the Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. I'm Becky Carmichael and today Dr. Mark Benfield with the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences tells us about his research on micro plastics in the Mississippi River, which could be called the river of plastic.
Mark Benfield
[0:22] I'm a biological oceanographer. In my lab we study zooplankton, little animals that drift and wiggle in the ocean. Recently, I've started looking at tiny pieces of plastic that are the same size as or smaller than so plankton. Why study microplastics, look around you and count all the things made of plastic. They are everywhere. I'm particularly interested in tiny fragments of plastic called microplastics. They're less than five millimeters in diameter and can get so small that you need a microscope to see them. They come from so many sources, plastic shopping bags, coffee couplets, water bottles, soda straws, tires, tiny micro beads that are added to facial cleansers, lipsticks, toothpaste and other personal care products, lint from laundering clothes made of synthetic fabrics, and a myriad of other sources. They all wind up in our waterways and ultimately in our oceans. Once microplastics get into the ocean, they really start to cause problems. First off, you have to understand that plastics are one of the most durable substances on the planet. They take hundreds to thousands of years to break down. Sure they break up into smaller and smaller fragments, but they don't go away. Each tiny piece acts like a sponge, absorbing organic pollutants from the surrounding water. They're so small, so similar in appearance and even in taste and smell to natural food. But so plankton in many fishes eat them. When they do the pollutants they carry into the animals, they accumulate. Many of the pollutants act like artificial hormones, which can mess with normal development. The plastics can block the digestive tracts. It can give the animals a false sense of fullness leading to reduce feeding and slower growth. It's not a good situation. One of the classes I teach is introduction to marine sciences. For the lab, I usually took the class to LUMCON, a state lab located down in Cocodrie, Louisiana. Part of that field trip involves a trip on one of their small research vessels into the bay. But in 2015, I got a chance to use their big ship, the research vessel Pelican for 24 hours. That was great because I can take my students out into the Gulf. My two postdocs, Roxy and Matt, suggested that we should use the trip to collect the first data that we knew of on micro plastics in the Gulf. How much was there? What kinds were there? What sizes? So we did. My poor students though. They immediately sailed out into really rough seas. It was a vomit fest, but I'm proud to say that most of them recovered and were able to work. We collected samples from four stations, and what we found was alarming. The amount of plastic in our samples was really high. You could see at the moment we poured the samples out of the net. Reds, blues, lime, green, yellow, tiny pieces of plastic. We have concentrations of micro plastic in the northern Gulf of Mexico that rival the highest abundances was reported anywhere in the ocean. Where's it coming from? Then we realized the Mississippi River. It had to be the major source. It drains the majority of the US, including major cities, industrial and agricultural areas. So that's what we're doing now looking at the role that the Mississippi plays, we need to understand how much of this potentially deadly material is being carried into the Gulf by the river. So far, we've sampled the river for a year, upstream and downstream of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. What we know is the Mississippi River transports vast quantities of microplastics and macro plastics into the Gulf of Mexico. But we still have many questions. What is the seasonal pattern to this flux? How do our biggest cities affect it? What is their impact? We found larval fishes in the river and we think that we can see tiny plastic particles in their guts. We can't be sure because we need a really sophisticated microscope spectrometer to say for certain. When we sampled zooplanktivorous fishes in Terrebonne Bay and looked in their stomachs, we found a lot of plastic. What about the other marine life? I've studied a lot interesting things in the ocean. I've been fortunate to travel to some amazing places. This is the first thing I've ever studied that has me really worried. I feel like it's the tip of an iceberg. I'm both excited and depressed by every new result. We are learning a lot every time we go out and collect data. I can no longer look at the Mississippi River and just see a river. I see a river of plastic.
Becky Carmichael
[4:26] Tell me what... Tell me what each one of these... What they are and the size and then let's do some... Let's hear what they sound like.
Mark Benfield
[4:38] What I've got here, just two jars out of a whole lot of jars that came from one sample that we collected with the net at the Davis pond diversion. So Davis pond is located upstream from New Orleans. It's a diversion where they allow some of the Mississippi River water to flow into Barataria Bay. And so we sampled with a net while the diversion was flowing, and we got so much plastic and then what we do is we take the sample and we pour it into a series of sips of different sizes so that the coarsest screen is four millimeters and then two millimeters, one, and so on. And so I just brought two of the jars from the two coarsest size fractions and you can see they're just loaded with plastic, big pieces. Some of them are recognizable. I mean there's a piece of a plastic flower there. Someone's brooch or or toy. There's a cap from a nine volt battery that says remove. Apparently remove and throw into the river. And then the next size fraction, these are called nurdles and these are little round translucent white to beige colored fragments. These are raw resin pellets. This is what they make plastics out. So when a plastic manufacturer gets these, they melt them and then mold them into some other product. They can add colorants and dyes. So these are just the raw nurdles.
Becky Carmichael
[6:16] So when I look at the nurdles, I have a couple of thoughts. One, is there any way to track who's releasing these in the water based on the composition and color? And then the second part about this is they look like tiny pebbles. They look like like gravel that you would sift through anyway or you'd find on some beaches.
Mark Benfield
[6:42] Yeah. But they'll probably last a lot longer than that gravel. In terms of tracking these, you know when we sample in Baton Rouge, we don't get many nurdles. We get a few. When we sample below New Orleans, we get quite a few. And these were collected just above New Orleans, so that helps us narrow it down. We know that somewhere between Baton Rouge and New Orleans there's a potential source of nurdles. Now if you look along the river there, there are lots of petrochemical plants and plastic manufacturers. So it's quite possible that they are coming from there. And when barges or ships loaded with nurdles are transferring their product to the plant, these things are getting spilled into the river and released. But we would have to do a pretty comprehensive survey of the river in order to narrow it down beyond that, but I don't think it's impossible.
Becky Carmichael
[7:35] No, and I would almost imagine to that any of the process where they're moving the components, they're moving the product either from the vessel to the plant or vice versa anytime over the waterway, or even not necessarily on the waterway, where there's a space that would be accessible for drainage. That this could be easily, well fairly easily, monitored.
Mark Benfield
[7:59] Yeah, I would think so. Some of these might have come from St. Louis. They might have come from Minnesota. I mean, the Mississippi is a big river. You know, this time of year, there's another source of round beads going into the river and that's the Mardi Gras beads. When you think about all the plastic beads and how many get broken and get washed down into our water treatment plants. And a lot of them will be caught. But a lot of those will make their way into the river as well.
Becky Carmichael
[8:27] I personally always wondered that because you see them after the parade. No one really wants those broken beads. They just leave this and here comes the street sweeper and the street sweepers picking those things up, but then where do they go? And what about the ones that aren't picked up in that capacity? I want to check out the larger pieces as well. Some of these look like they've been tumbled quite for quite a while. And...
Mark Benfield
[8:54] Yeah, they've got really smooth, rounded edges. Some of them, yeah, almost like beach glass in some ways.
Becky Carmichael
[9:00] Yeah, and I can't help but see that that's straw some sort, and a yellow plastic ring. So some from like a child ring or from a sucker. Ring pop! That's what I'm trying to think of.
Mark Benfield
[9:17] So many of these are single use plastics. So you mentioned soda straws. Think in the course of a day, how many times you handle plastic, and you use it just once. So you go to CC's and you get your coffee cup and the plastic lid on that cup. You use it once and you throw the cup away. CC's even has a little box of plastic plugs that will plug up the hole in the top of the coffee cup. So that it doesn't spill in your car or spill on your hand. How many times do you go to the grocery store and every vegetable or fruit that you buy goes in a small polyethylene bag and then you get a single shopping bag that you take home and it probably gets thrown out. Soda straw. Whenever you go to a restaurant, you get that straw. Sometimes it's wrapped in plastic. You use a coffee cup stirrer, that gets wrapped in plastic. These are all single use items that are going to last 1000 years and we use them for a matter of seconds. I remember I was on a plane. And you know, when you're on an airplane, a long haul flight, they're always bringing you glasses of water. And it is so difficult to hang on to one glass of water and just get them to refill it. Because if you turn your head away or doze off, a flight attendant will grab that and it's gone, you know? And think of the excess weight of all this plastic that's used once. Rather than giving someone a more durable couple of my last for the whole flight.
Becky Carmichael
[10:44] One of the questions that I really wanted to ask you today is about how... What first drew you to this particular research? Because I know you have quite a background in the type of research you've done. And I want to talk a little bit later about gulf serpent and your work in the depths of the gulf and the ocean. But what triggered this area of microplastics?
Mark Benfield
[11:09] So one of the international groups that I've been fortunate to be involved with for probably about 12, 15 years now is the International Council for Exploration of the Sea, or ICES, working group on zooplankton ecology. And so ICES is a is a non-governmental organization, an NGO, that provides advice on marine science related matters and fisheries to the European Union. Canada, Russia and the United States are also members of ISIS, but they have their own agencies for providing that advice. So the working group for zooplankton ecology, we've been meeting every year, usually in Europe, usually in really nice places. And over the past, I would say, eight years microplastics have started to become a topic of concern. And that's where I really first heard about them. So if you fast forward to 2010, we had the Gulf oil spill and my lab was very involved in analyzing zooplankton and trying to understand the impacts of the spill on the Gulf. But as the funding for the oil spill was winding down a few years ago, I started thinking about what direction do I want my lab to start moving in for the next five to 10 years. And microplastics had always been something that intrigued me and kind of worried me. And I didn't find any data on microplastics here in the Gulf of Mexico. So I thought, well, let's just do a little pilot survey, which is what that cruise was about, and see if it's an issue here. And sure enough, it was. And so now we have a Sea Grant project, looking at the Mississippi River and we're writing some bigger proposals involving people from all over campus to try and start looking at microplastics on a larger scale. Looking at the Bayou Lafourche watershed, looking at how community resilience is related to plastic awareness, how microplastics are getting into our waterways. And then how can we educate particularly children to start to change attitudes about single use plastics and plastic pollution in general. You know, if you look around campus, just look down as you walk. You will see so much plastic and we don't even see it. It's invisible. People will walk across campus. They'll walk across their neighborhoods. And there's plastic everywhere and no one notices it. It's become this invisible pollutant. But once it gets into our storm sewers and into our waterways, you know, it's quite visible to the marine life. And it's potentially a huge problem.
Becky Carmichael
[13:59] I want us to get back to zooplankton. So microplastics and zooplankton, what is the connection? Why is that important to research?
Mark Benfield
[14:10] Well zooplankton are near the base of the marine food web. So we have single-cell plants that are photosynthesizing and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and zooplankton are then feeding on the single-celled plants. Zooplankton are fish food. Almost all fish rely on zooplankton, as a major part of their diet for all or part of their their lives. The microplastics are the same size as the single-celled plants that zooplankton eat and the bigger microplastics are the same size as the zooplankton. So zooplankton are feeding on microplastics, and they're picking up what we call POPS, persistent organic pollutants. These are things like DDT, polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, PAH's. All of these organic compounds stick to the surface of the plastics and then when the zooplankton eat them, they're released into the bodies of the zooplankton, and through a process called bio magnification, when fish eat those zooplankton, they get an even larger dose, and it moves on up the food web. So really, the microplastics are serving as a false or a proxy pray for zooplankton and for the animals that eat zooplankton. And that's what's got us worried, you know, we collected some fish from Terra Bombay. And just at random I chose a golf man Hayden and striped Anchovy. These are both small fish that feed on zooplankton. When my postdoc, Matt and I opened the stomach's of those and opened and looked inside. The amount of microplastics was incredible. I mean, I was shocked. Thousands of little fibers that were in the stomach's of both these fish, some bigger pieces too. Something that looked like a piece of a polyethylene rapper was in the main Hayden. So these fish are eating these compounds, they're getting the POPS that are on the surface of the plastic. And where does it go from there? Well, we know that menhaden get eaten by bigger fish. Menhaden are also the biggest fishery in the Gulf of Mexico. And those fish are ground up and they're turned into poultry feed, they're turned into animal feed. They're used to produce fish oils. So how much of these pollutants that are ingested incidentally with the plastics are making their way potentially into our food supply?
Becky Carmichael
[16:41
The examples that we have that you brought today, both the nurdles and the bigger pieces of plastic, these are just kind of two types of the plastic forms. You also mentioned fibers that you were finding in the manhaden. Did I say that word right?
Mark Benfield
[16:54] Menhaden.
Becky Carmichael
[16:55] So the fibers that you found in the menhaden, are those the fibers that you associate with clothing?
Mark Benfield
[17:01] Yes.
Becky Carmichael
[17:02] So describe some of the types of clothing that might be producing these fibers.
Mark Benfield
[17:09] So most of our clothing is made of cotton, or cotton blends. But there are a lot of garments that are made entirely of synthetic fibers. So we're talking about things like rayon, nylon, polyester. These are all filaments of plastic that are spun and used to make very durable clothes. I've got a fleece made by Columbia. I love it. I've had it for years, but it's made up of entirely of synthetic fiber. A lot of these are recycled plastics that are then turned into clothing. But when you wash your laundry, think every time you clean the dryer vent. How much lint is there? Well even more lint gets washed in the washing machine, washed off the clothes, and gets pushed down the drain. Now, our sewage treatment plants do a pretty good job of collecting a lot of that. But some of it makes its way into the waterways directly. It gets passed the filters. And then when they take that sludge, and they use it as landfill, or they use it as fertilizer, and it rains, then a lot of those fibers wash off again and make their way back into our waterways.
Becky Carmichael
[18:23] So it really makes you question the good that these recycled plastic fleeces... Because I have a couple. I have one from when I was working with a governmental agency. It was 100% or all made out of recycled plastic bottles. And every time you wash that, then you're just kind of putting the plastic back out there.
Mark Benfield
[18:43] Yeah. Now, that said, there are some solutions to this. I mean, we could put filters on the outflow of our washing machines, you know. I think technologically, it's not impossible to imagine ways to filter, the water that's coming out of your washing machine, much in the way that we filter the air that's coming out of our dryers. Of course it would be a smaller filter and might require more maintenance, but I'm sure there's some clever engineers out there who can figure a way to keep a lot of the stuff out of our wastewater screen.
Becky Carmichael
[19:16] And you can also see, you know, having that mechanism to trap it, but then a way to collect that and make sure that it is properly disposed of, so that it is not getting back in one of the many ways in which it goes back down into the water. We're talking about the size of the plastic. What's the smallest size of microplastics that you have found?
Mark Benfield
[19:40] So we actually filter water out of the river, and we pass it through a 10 micron filter, the filter system we use is very much like the filter system you might have in a camp where you're filtering your water just to get larger particulates out of it. And we take those filters and then we can back wash them, and we can get the particles off them. We are finding microplastics that are the same size as single cell diatom. So these are single celled phytoplankton, they're only probably 5 to 10 microns across. Maybe the bigger ones are about 15 or 20 microns. We are also finding them the same size as single-celled Amoeba-like animals called radiolarians. We get these tiny little fibers, and they're so conspicuous because they're purple or they're blue. They're not colors that you normally associate with green life.
Becky Carmichael
[20:36] Is there anything about the microplastics component that I haven't asked you or that you want to share before I move into a little bit more about you and, kind of, how you got here and your story?
Mark Benfield
[20:49] Well, I think, you know, right now we are next to a huge river system. And it's a real challenge to sample in that river. It's a dangerous place to work. I mean, it's hard to even get into the river when you're in a small boat. We use a 24-foot University boat. We have to go in near Slidell through a series of locks, we go in the same locks that the big barges go through. We talk to the lock controllers on our radios. We get out into the river. And then to sample north of New Orleans, up near Norco, we actually have to run all the way up the river in our boat, because there's no place up there to get into the river. So that's kind of fun to cruise past downtown New Orleans in a speedboat. But it's a long run. And then the whole time that you're working in that river, you've constantly got to be looking around you because there's so much river traffic. And then we're sampling with a small net. The Nets probably about a yard across and six inches high with some floats. We're skimming the surface of the water because most of these plastics float. So we're sampling with a net called a Manta net that's sampling the upper few inches of the water column. But again, the river is so big, to get a representative sample of that river, we have to criss cross the river. One net will be one way across the river and we'll wash it out. The next sample will be going back and we'll do three or four tows, oblique tows across the river to get a picture. But that's just one snapshot in time. To really comprehensively sample a system like the Mississippi River, it would be necessary to be out there almost every day, and then you're creating massive quantities of samples. And then to say that these particles are plastic is a real challenge. We have to use a kind of a microscope called an FTIR microscope, or Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy microscope, and this looks at the infrared absorption signal from the different plastics. And then we can match that up to library values for polystyrene or polyethylene. And we can say what kinds of plastics they are. That's very expensive. We use the microscope at (inaudible). They've been really helpful to us. But again, it's time consuming. So this is a very laborious process. So it's easy to collect the samples, then there's a really long process in actually sorting through the sample and getting the information.
Becky Carmichael
[23:24] So with the samples, do you find that you have been able to foster some strong collaborations to collect the plastics but also to process them once you have them back in the lab?
Mark Benfield
[23:37] Yeah, we've done some collaborations. We're not currently working with any universities outside of LSU. But within LSU, it's been a great chance to engage some undergraduate students in the research. So I have undergraduate students, Evan, who works in my lab. Evan is our key sorter. He's really fast, and he's very efficient. And then Alex just got an undergraduate research opportunities project Europe through Sea grant. And so she's going to be looking at plastics on LSU's campus to start to document where they're accumulating. What are some of the ways that they're getting into the local waterways. So we're excited about that. And then we just wrote a big proposal that involves colleagues from the Ag Center, the 4H program, the education department, the sociology department, the plant pathology department, and this is a big collaborative project that we wrote a proposal to the National Academy of Sciences with, and we're really excited. We hope that it will be funded because if it is it'll really give us a chance to leapfrog ahead and really ramp up our monitoring program. And the cool thing about that is we have a citizen science kit. It's basically a kit that my postdoc, Matt, designed, which we can give to schools. They can go out and collect water samples from their local bodies of water, filter them, send them back to us, and we can process them and start to build up a picture of where microplastics are accumulating throughout the state of Louisiana.
Becky Carmichael
[25:26] This project, to me, emphasizes the importance of citizen science and the involvement of stakeholders in their local area. Have you had much response or have you... What response have you had to this particular project and to this particular type of pollutant outside of the university?
Mark Benfield
[25:47] We haven't had a chance to really send kids out to any schools yet. So it's probably a bit premature to say that they're excited. But I can tell you that we had a booth at Ocean commotion, which Louisiana Sea Grant's big Marine Science extravaganza for elementary schools. It's held in the fall. And we had a display on microplastics and got a very positive response. A lot of teachers asked us about that kit. We're really interested in it. The big net people, the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary program, were interested in that we provided them with some educational materials and PowerPoint presentations on microplastics. So I think that we really just need the funding to get the program rolling. And then I think there'll be a great deal of interest.
Becky Carmichael
[26:38] What would you suggest for someone who is listening and they're concerned about their use of plastic? What are some things that you might suggest for them to start doing now today, to reduce the amount of plastic that's ending up in our waterway?
Mark Benfield
[26:54] Well, just think twice about what single-use plastic objects you're using each day and make a choice as to whether or not you feel they're necessary. If you buy a cup of coffee, and you're going to drive from coffee shop to campus, then yeah, you probably need a lid on that cup. But if you're just going to enjoy that coffee at the coffee house, ask them to leave the lid off. And you know, use a wooden stir stick rather than a plastic stir stick if possible. You don't need a soda straw to drink out of a cup. It's convenient. But long before we had soda straws, we were drinking from the the edges of a cup. And so, you know, make that choice. When you're at the supermarket, get a reusable shopping bag. You know, I go to Trader Joe's, I go to Whole Foods, and I have my own shopping bags with me. You don't need to use those. You don't need to put every vegetable or fruit that you buy in an individual plastic bag. You should wash it when you get home anyway. So just put them in your shop bag and wash them before you use them. I think there are a lot of opportunities like that. And then be aware that in many places in this country there are a lot of initiatives on the ballots to try and limit legislation or actions to put deposits on single use bags. A lot of legislation is making it more difficult for communities to say we don't want single use shopping bags and so be aware of those and talk to your legislators if those kinds of initiatives appear on the ballot. I know there was one up in New York State quite recently.
Becky Carmichael
[28:45] Can you think back to that day where you were collecting and can you describe that day, that moment where you, your postdoc, and your lab group discovered the amount of plastic? Kind of give me some of the feelings for that.
Mark Benfield
[29:02] So we were on the Pelican, and as I say, it was pretty rough. We were working out there we got the first net over the side. We didn't know how long we should sample. Because it would depend on how many animals were in the water. If there's a lot of jellyfish and other gelatinous animals, you don't want to tow for too long, because it clogs up the net. It makes it a nightmare to wash it all down. So I think we did about a 10 minute tow. And we pulled that net up and we washed everything down. And we untied the card and the bottom end of the net and washed all the sample into a sieve. And I didn't know what to expect. And I looked down I just saw the color. And I said, Oh my god, you know, we've got so much plastic here. And we started looking and there was one piece then there was another. There were probably 25 or 30 pieces between the two different net cod ends. And yeah, that's that was kind of amazing. I was really excited because I knew we were onto something. But the more I think about it, the more samples I look at, it really does get depressing. There's so much plastic out there.
Becky Carmichael
[30:16] What were the responses of your students?
Mark Benfield
[30:18] I think they were pretty interested. The ones that were able to work at that point in time because a lot of them were feeling horribly seasick. But the ones that were up and around, I think they found that it was pretty interesting.
Becky Carmichael
[30:31] I think I want to talk to you a little bit about your story, Mark.
Mark Benfield
[30:34] Okay.
Becky Carmichael
[30:35] Because I know there's more questions I want to ask you about the microplastics because I personally am just fascinated. I'm troubled. I know that I look around my own home already... I've been doing this for several years of where I can reduce the plastic in my house. And I always get frustrated because there's always something else that's a piece of plastic, or it's a styrofoam. And the thing that bothers me the most when you get a package or something is they put those pockets of air in the plastic. That infuriates me to no end, and I had talked to someone at a UPS Store and found that they'll take them from me. So I'll just take them back and say, "Hey, do you want to use this?" Just so it's less plastic in the house.
Mark Benfield
[31:27] That's great, because I actually find those things less annoying than the styrofoam popcorn. The popcorn that you get in plastic and shipping containers is a nightmare because it's so brittle, that when that stuff gets into the environment, it just keeps breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. And when my undergraduate student Evan is sampling or is working through the samples, he find so much styrofoam. I mean, styrofoam is one of the dominant components of plastic. And it's really small, because by the time it's been in those systems, we don't find single pieces of popcorn. We find thousands of pieces that broke off of a single piece of popcorn.
Becky Carmichael
[32:10] Wow! And that styrofoam is in so much stuff.
Mark Benfield
[32:15] Yeah.
Becky Carmichael
[32:17] I wanted to... Just kind of thinking about... I'm thinking about different seasons. And I'm wondering if there's a spike with particular styrofoam or if it's constant, because you think about in the summer and someone's like, Oh, I'm gonna go out in the water, I'm gonna go enjoy to the beach, or I'm going to go tubing. And then you get something that's styrofoam or something. And how much of that... If there is a spike in certain parts of the season where you might find...
Mark Benfield
[32:45] Or, you know, you decide you want to have some soft drinks or some cold beer and you buy one of those flimsy styrofoam coolers from a drugstore for a few bucks. And the thing falls apart by the end of the day and it gets tossed. You know, what happens to that? Yeah, styrofoam is really ubiquitous. I don't know, whether there's a season. One could imagine after Christmas there's probably a lot of deliveries and a lot of styrofoam. But then after the big spring melt, snow melt up north and you get a flood down downstream in the river here, you could get a lot of that stuff washing down at that time too.
Becky Carmichael
[33:24] I could see that.
Mark Benfield
[33:25] Coffee cups. I mean styrofoam coffee cups. They're so common. We see them all the time. Water bottles, you know? Those are another really common thing. We started to count water bottles that we saw in the river when we were running from the lower part of the river up to our sampling site north of New Orleans. And we just gave up after a while. There's just too many.
Becky Carmichael
[33:46] It's depressing showing someone this evidence of where this is ending up. It's ending up in your food, not just the fish that you eat. But even if you're vegetarian, I wonder how much the chemical that's associated with the plastic gets taken up into the plant system and you're still consuming that base from this release.
Mark Benfield
[34:11] That's an interesting question. I can't really speak to the plant side of things, but a recent paper came out where they had looked at fish collected from fish markets in Indonesia and in Southern California. And about 25% of the fish that they sampled had microplastics in their flesh. Another study that came out of Belgium... Now this hasn't been peer reviewed as far as I know. But the Belgians like their mussels, and mussels are filter feeders. So they were finding all kinds of micro plastic in the mussels, which then when you eat a muscle, you eat the whole thing. So you presumably would ingest the micro plastic as well.
Becky Carmichael
[34:53] The micro plastic that's been in anything, from someone's toothpaste to face wash to potentially your detergent bottle, would get a nice dose of that with your tasty mussel.
Mark Benfield
[35:05] One of the websites that I... Well not websites, but it's a group that's on Twitter. A microplastics awareness site. For Valentine's Day, they were pointing out that a lot of lipsticks have microplastics in them. So they were advising people not to do that and kiss someone because they might be transferring these microplastics to the other person.
Becky Carmichael
[35:27] If you remember that group, you'll have to tell me that. I'd love to follow that one.
Mark Benfield
[35:30] Sure.
Becky Carmichael
[35:31] What is your official title here at LSU?
Mark Benfield
[35:35] I'm a professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, which is a department within the College of the Coast and Environment.
Becky Carmichael
[35:43] And how did you get to LSU?
Mark Benfield
[35:46] I came to LSU to do a postdoc. It was my second postdoc. I had gotten I got my bachelor's degree in Toronto at the University of Toronto. Then I went to South Africa and got a master's degree there. Then I went to Texas A&M, got my PhD there. So I'm an Aggie. Then I did a postdoc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And then there was a chance to come down and work with a scientist in my department, Dr. Richard Shaw, who I'd always admired, and he had a position open. So I came down and did a postdoc with him. And then while I was doing that postdoc, a faculty position opened up in the department, and I wound up getting that position. And here I am.
Becky Carmichael
[36:30] But that's some journey from Canada to South Africa.
Mark Benfield
[36:33] Yeah, yeah, all over. I was actually born in South Africa. So it was actually a chance to go back and visit a country that I had really left when I was about two and a half years old. And I still had extended family there. And the University of Cozumel Natal, where I studied, had a funded project and my background was a good match for it. And I was working on plants. And so I worked on a reed called Frag Mighty Astrolis. We get it here in Louisiana. It's a cosmopolitan species. And while it was an interesting project, I learned that I really didn't like working on plants. And so I was able to start working on a project on zooplankton and that really got my interest.
Becky Carmichael
[37:20] So through this travel, this process, what has been some of those memorable moments for you? So thinking about memorable research moments?
Mark Benfield
[37:35] Oh, I think there were a few. I got a chance to go down in a submarine, the Johnson Sea Link. Now that sounds more glamorous than it actually was. This was on George's bank, which is in the North Atlantic. And conditions when we launched were marginal, because the sea was quite rough, and the storm was coming. But we went down, I was in the back of the sub, not in a nice clear acrylic sphere up front. But there was a light outside my viewpoint. And I could see all these little zooplankton, swimming and darting around in front of the window. And that was the first time I had ever really kind of seen the world of plankton, you know, underwater, and to see how many there were. And the different kinds was fascinating. It was less fun when we got to the surface and we bobbed around for about 45 minutes until they were able to recover us. And that was really pretty grueling. By the time I got out of that sub I just wanted to find my bunk and lay down for a while. I'd say another experience was when I went to Woods Hole, I was working with an instrument called the video plankton recorder, which is a toad underwater microscope. And it was developed at Woods Hole. And we were using it as part of a big study on George's bank. And when you're sitting on a ship, and you're seeing in real time this video stream coming up from this underwater microscope, and you're seeing all these amazing animals popping up on your screen. I mean, that, to me was fascinating. That really opened up a window that I didn't know existed into the ocean. And because of that, you know, I've continued to work with underwater imaging systems. We built some in my lab, and I never tire of looking at these amazing animals. They're just so many of them. They're so alien looking, looking at them in their own environment. And looking at their incredible adaptations, their shapes, their morphology, they're just beautiful.
Becky Carmichael
[39:37] That leads me into Gulf Serpent and the work you've done with different oil and gas companies, kind of, those collaborations and partnerships. Describe some of the interesting sea creatures that you've discovered through that collaboration.
Mark Benfield
[39:54] So Gulf Serpent is a partnership between the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico. And it's part of a global project called SERPENT, which is a really long acronym developed in England. But in the Gulf of Mexico, we work with BP with Shell. We've worked with Petrobras, Chevron. We're just starting a partnership with Anadarko. And basically on all these deepwater rigs, they have remotely operated vehicles. And these ROVs are their eyes and their hands. They go down. They inspect equipment. They move things around. They tighten valves, open and close valves. And when they're not busy, which is about 25% of the time, the oil companies let us use those ROVs to study deep sea biodiversity. So it's been a real win win situation. It's great for them. They're an industry that certainly gets a chance to show that they have a commitment to the environment. The Deepwater Horizon was one of my sites. And I made it few trips out to that rig and we collected some great data from there. We've seen incredible stuff. We've seen oarfish, which are the longest bony fishes in the world. These are fish that can reach about 20 to 23 feet in length. We've seen a giant jellyfish called Stygiomedusa Gigantea. This thing has arms that are about 20 feet long, and it's got a bell. It's about three feet across. We didn't even know that thing was in the Gulf of Mexico, but we've seen it about a dozen times. It's not that rare. It's just we just weren't looking for it. So yeah, we see all kinds of incredible deep sea animals. Sometimes I'm out on the rigs and get to see them as their imaged. Other times they're out collecting data and they just send the DVDs or the hard drives back to me and I get to see them in the lab.
Becky Carmichael
[41:50] And so if anybody who would want to see more of those images, because I know from your TEDxLSU 2016 talk, you really shared some of the video footage from the underwater rovers. It was really impressive. I'm always impressed with both the oarfish and how it moves, but then you said that it was the jellyfish.
Mark Benfield
[42:14] Yes, the Stygiomedusa Gigantea. Yeah
Becky Carmichael
[42:16] I'm not gonna attempt to say that right now.
Mark Benfield
[42:19] So Stygiomedusa is cool because it's got a fish called (inaudible)... Well now I have to remember the name. Anyway, it's got a fish that lives in its bell. And it only occurs in the bell of this single species of jellyfish. So this really weird looking blue fish that swims around probably getting protection from Stygiomedusa and feeding on things that the jellyfish catches. That only occurs in association with Stygiomedusa.
Becky Carmichael
[42:54] Wow. So now that leads me to think in terms of the research you've done in the depths of the Gulf. I wonder how much of the micro plastic that you're studying now at that surface in those few inches is making its way down into the Gulf. And what kind of complications you might have to try to determine in the water column, how far it's going down.
Mark Benfield
[43:20] That's a really interesting question. So there are papers coming out now in the past couple of years that have shown microplastics, particularly these fibers in a whole lot of different deep sea animals. So one study, they just opportunistically sampled whatever deep sea animals they could collect. And these were thousands of feet down. And they found microplastics on all of them. So a colleague of mine, Craig McClain, who's the Director of LUMCON, and he's a deep sea ecologist. He's going out this spring on an MSF funded cruise to put wood at the bottom of the ocean to study how this carbon in the form of wood gets colonized by different deep sea animals. And during that study, we want to collect micro plastic samples from the surface from further out in the Gulf of Mexico. And we want to try and collect some animals from the deep sea to see if we can get some evidence of microplastics in the Gulf of Mexico. But it is an open question, what happens to all this plastic? We know it's continually flowing from rivers and from the land into the ocean. So how much of it is recycled and consumed by animals at the surface? How much of it makes its way to the deep sea and what are the pathways by which this plastic gets down into the deep sea? We don't have a good answer to those questions, but I think they're important things to address.
Becky Carmichael
[44:46] It definitely sounds like through your research it's just at the surface, and there's more to be discovered. If you could tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?
Mark Benfield
[45:02] Buy Apple stock.
Becky Carmichael
[45:05] Buy Apple stock? I...
Mark Benfield
[45:07] Yeah.
Becky Carmichael
[45:07] I agree.
Mark Benfield
[45:08] No, something biological. I would have started looking at microplastics a long time ago. I mean, plastics were invented during World War II, and we don't have any good time series on how they've accumulated. So there were some studies done in the late 60s and the 70s. Just a few studies that documented plastics in the ocean. But I think that would have been a great area to work on to look at zooplankton and microplastics at a time when their abundances were really starting to increase. I mean, imagine if we could have captured public awareness about this issue a long time ago, you know? And the other thing that I think would have been really interesting to start working at some time ago, would be to get engineers and optics scientists involved in developing some kind of a remote system that can map plastic. We don't have something we can tow through the water that's a plastic indicator that tells us how much and what kinds of plastic are present. And we really need something like that. Because as I mentioned earlier, it's just such a labor intensive process to collect net samples, and work up the data from those samples. we really need an instrument that we can tow through the water. Some kind of an underwater spectrometer that would give us an indication of how much plastic is present, where it's present. So I think that's something that, you know, I'm sure people are working on that now. It's not an easy problem. But if we had started trying to tackle that earlier, maybe we'd be at a point today where we have something that's usable.
Becky Carmichael
[46:55] What is some advice that you would give students interested in pursuing a degree in Oceanography?
Mark Benfield
[47:04] I would say, if you're in high school, make sure that you're taking biology, math, chemistry, and physics. Make sure that you do well in those subjects. Get involved, even at the high school level, in research. My nephew who's just graduating as a senior from high school in New York worked in a lab, a neurobiology lab over the summer. And he's going to be a coauthor on a paper in Science.
Becky Carmichael
[47:37] That's exciting.
Mark Benfield
[47:37] Which is really amazing, because I've never had a paper in science. So get involved. And then when you come to campus, get involved with your professors. You know, we love to have students come and talk to us. If we have an opportunity in our labs we'll make that available to you. Get a chance to stand out and become known to your professors. When it's time to go to graduate school, not only are you going to have that experience on your resume, but you'll have people who can write strong letters for you supporting your application. You'll be building a network with those professors and with your fellow students that will endure further on in your career.
Becky Carmichael
[48:22] And what about citizen science? What advice would you give for someone who's listening and they want to get involved in either the research, the collection, or the reduction.
Mark Benfield
[48:36] We don't have a network here in Louisiana that is monitoring microplastics. And we're hoping to establish that within the next few years to get something going. But I would get on Twitter, get on the web, there are so many organizations that are devoted to plastics awareness, particularly organizations that are involved in getting plastics out of the environment, and keeping them out of the waters. And so I would get involved with those and volunteer your time. And you know, there's the Nature Conservancy. They have some initiatives in this area. We are a coastal state. We have all kinds of NGOs involved in Louisiana. In conservation, the national estuary program, NEP, has a lot of outreach. Our sea grant program has a lot of programs. So do a bit of research. Get on Google and you'll find all kinds of opportunities.
Becky Carmichael
[49:40] What gets you excited to go into the lab?
Mark Benfield
[49:44] Well anytime that I can actually spend some time on a microscope or looking at video from my SERPENT project research, or even better, get out in the field and collect samples. That's why I got into this business in the first place. And I spend a lot of time in front of a computer. So it's always a nice distraction to be able to get into the lab and spend some time looking at a sample. Sadly, I don't get that much time to do it these days. I'm writing proposals, writing papers. Doing all the usual things that academics do. But I've got... I'm working with some really talented people. And so I get a chance to look over their shoulder and see what they're finding. My postdoc, Matt, is always calling me into lab to look at some sample that we got or something interesting.
Becky Carmichael
[50:36] So tell me about Recycle Mississippi and the guys. You talked about the guys on the the raft made of plastic?
Mark Benfield
[50:44] Yeah, so there was a group of five guys who sailed down the entire length of the Mississippi. They sailed from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico on a raft made of recycled plastic. It was mostly made of wood and plastic bottles. Flotation was a pontoon raft. So flotation for the whole thing was from lots of bottles that were filled with CO2. Actually put dry ice in each of these bottles, and then sealed them up. And they were sort of pressurized.
Becky Carmichael
[51:13] Oh wow!
Mark Benfield
[51:13] It was a really cool design. So they talked to us about their journey, and they have a website recycledmississippi.org. And they collected samples. We gave them a plankton net, and they collected some samples above and below St. Louis, which we're going to look at. So it will give us a picture of, you know, what the concentrations of microplastics are like further up the river. And then they came to our lab and brought the samples, and we looked at some of them. They visited Mike the Tiger. They really got a chance to see what LSU was about. And they've got a great webcast on that. And they ultimately made it all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. And then they donated their boat to a group on the Mississippi River who does environmental outreach. And so it was great chance to meet them and an opportunity to just sort of participate in some small way. And it was really quite an epic journey. We thought they were going to get killed. We didn't think they'd survive. I mean, a small boat like that. They had a 24th horsepower outboard motor, but they made it and they had a great time.
Becky Carmichael
[52:23
What was the group's name?
Mark Benfield
[52:24] Recycled Mississippi.
Becky Carmichael
[52:26] Recycled Mississippi. And they have some videos of their journey too.
Mark Benfield
[52:30] They do. They have a website. I think it's recycledmississippi.org. And they have a Facebook page as well. And you can get on there and see all of their videos. They had a drone. They really put together some great videos. And these were five guys from all over the world, from Europe, from New Zealand, all over.
Becky Carmichael
[52:51] That's the kind of adventure I think I would enjoy taking. I mean... Yeah, I think there's a risk there but you... I would imagine you would really meet some pretty interesting people along the way. But then the opportunity to collaborate with groups like that. To have samples taken and that kind of collaboration and partnerships is exciting.
Mark Benfield
[53:09] Yeah, it is. And I think one thing I learned from their trip was just how different the Mississippi River is between Minnesota and here. I mean, it starts out as a really wild river surrounded by forests and hills. And then you get down to the Lower Mississippi and you've got this very much industrialized River. So it really changes.
Becky Carmichael
[53:33] That would be interesting. I keep thinking about that boat though. Again, I've seen that on seeing that on their video and I'm really wondering how they didn't tip that over. Or if they, you know... If they docked? Where did they go to stop for the night? Did they just keep taking shifts, you know, staying awake?
Mark Benfield
[53:55] People took them in. You know, there are a lot of marinas on the Upper Mississippi, so they could pull into marinas. Lots of towns took them in as they got further down the river. When they got to Baton Rouge, they actually pulled in on the banks right near the vet school. Sort of hid the boat on the muddy bank and got an Uber to a house where they were going to stay.
Becky Carmichael
[54:20] That now sounds very Louisiana. Hide the boat, get the Uber, go into town. Yeah, because I was also wondering that there has to be some kind of like laws or regulations on what they could and couldn't do, right? Going down the river, they have to have like a... You have to have like a boat of a certain size?
Mark Benfield
[54:38] I don't think there are any restrictions. They had to have a radio. They had to have a motor. But otherwise, apparently any boat could do it.
Becky Carmichael
[54:48] So that's not necessarily us saying here's our permission to go do that, make sure that you're safe. But yeah. Very cool. I don't know. I could talk to you all day about the plastic. Because again, like I said, I'm always frustrated when I go to buy something. And it's like really, it's in this plastic and then I look and I try to recycle it and then I can't recycle it. Or something about like Louisiana's... Like the different recycling places, they won't accept it. And I'm guilty of putting things in the recycling bin that probably shouldn't be recycled, that can't be recycled out of just anger of like "It should be recycled. I'm putting it in there." And then I learned well, if you do that, then they have to dump all this stuff.
Mark Benfield
[55:35] Yeah. You know, when you think about our neighborhoods, our neighborhoods are micro plastic factories. We are washing clothes and we're pumping fibers down the drain from our washing machines. We're cutting the grass with lawn mowers that are chopping up pieces of plastic that are on our lawns. A weed whacker...
Becky Carmichael
[55:38] Weed whackers. That line!
Mark Benfield
[55:59] You know, that entire line. Where does it go? It doesn't just evaporate. It's breaking into tiny fragments that wash down the drain. We put our trash out. And if you've ever followed a trash truck in Baton Rouge, there's a trail of trash behind that doesn't all make its way into the truck. The same goes for the recycling trucks. And then of course we have every... I live near a McDonald's and I can tell you that I find plastic trash from McDonald's in my neighborhood all the time. People don't see it anymore, and it makes its way down the drain. So our cities are really micro plastic factories. And a lot of that stuff is getting into the drains. So we really need to take steps. I mean it sounds trite. Pick up the litter. Pick it up off your grass before you cut the grass, but I think that can make a big difference.
Becky Carmichael
[56:52] Is there anything else that you want to share with anyone who'd be listening?
Mark Benfield
[57:00] It's a great field right now, you know? I know that funding is a challenge for a lot of scientists. Funding for college is a challenge. Stick with it. It is the most rewarding career that I can imagine. You really get a chance to see things that nobody else has ever seen before and to understand problems that are really important. I love it, and I would highly recommend it.
Experimental Podcast
[57:31] Experimental was recorded and produced in the KLSU Studios here on the campus of Louisiana State University and is supported by LSU's Communication Across the Curriculum and the College of Science. Today's interview was conducted by Becky Carmichael and edited by Bailey Wilder. To learn more about today's episode, subscribe to the podcast, ask questions and recommend future investigators visit cxc.lsu.edu/experimental