Andrew Thaler

As always, these are preliminary results. There's a lot more work left to do. Our first analysis from shrimp and gastropods at the deepest known vent system reveals that not only is microplastic ac...

All summer we've been working on nailing down the right protocol and performing a cursory scan of our samples to identify the first sample cluster to really dive into. After finding a single shrimp...

Now that I have the extraction process dialed in, it's time to start looking more broadly at the deep-sea samples. For this next pass, I'm looking at shrimp, squat lobsters, and barnacles from a hy...

Over the last week I have been refining my extraction and staining technique. The first results are in.This is the filtered remains of five limpets from the deep sea that were digested in KOH, filt...

They don't look like much, but our first ten samples are on the slow march towards microplastic analysis. These limpets are Olgasolaris tollmannii, a deep-sea species that lives on the shells of la...

We're about to start cruising here! Last month I got a surprise grant awarded for a different project that needed to be fulfilled by June 15, so apologies for the silence here but we got that done ...

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this campaign! I look forward to keeping you updated as the project develops over the next six months. And for those wondering, Blackbeard Biologic (my comp...

So how are we actually getting microplastic out of the tissue of deep-sea animals?The short answer is that we're going to dissolve whole organisms in a strong base and then filter out the remaining...

Within a week of submitting this experiment proposal for review, the first reports of microplastics isolated from within cold seep organisms was published: Microplastic sink that cannot be ignored ...