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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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My parent comment is so downvoted that it's unlikely many will see this.
I am a scientist by training and am inherently skeptical of many scientific studies. Science progresses through the accumulation of many results and the survival of models which explains them. Individual papers mean little but will contribute toward the broader understanding only if they are corroborated over time.
I made a flippant remark about this paper because I am suspicious of the team reporting to find plastics everywhere. Since I made a stink, I bothered to look into the paper. The study is only slightly shoddy. The conclusion that plastics were found in all samples would be better stated as "found at levels higher than the blanks." They found plastics in every field blank tested (Table 1) and especially for the second location where they used a more sophisticated device than Petri dishes.
I think Table 2 is slightly off because they subtracted the plastic count from the blanks, but they didn't put in negative counts when the blanks were higher. For example, at the first location there were as many blue plastics in total in the blanks as in the test samples. But they cited a net 1 in the tests because that corresponding blank didn't have blue plastic. That seems invalid because they aren't accounting for the noise in detecting 0-3 pieces randomly across all samples if it is coming from environmental or lab contamination.
Also, fume hoods don't keep contaminants out of the samples. They keep samples out of the rest of the lab.
Overall, there were more plastic pieces in the blowhole samples than the field blanks. There's something to it. Is it actually relevant to animal health? TBD.