Whales migrate past our Bay Area coastline. But now a team from Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station is raising concern about a possible threat to their food chain from microplastics
Savoca and Stanford colleagues, including Shirel Kahane-Rapport, Ph.D., set out to track where the whales feed and the food they're eating. But first, it helps to understand that microplastics can flush though the San Francisco Bay and other urban areas in high concentrations, originating from items many of us might be wearing right now.
The Stanford team used multiple methods to track the whales, including non-invasive tags, backed up with aerial drones and a host of monitoring equipment. "It's an echo sounder," Kahane-Rapport explained. "So basically, it's these big orange porcelain discs."She says the echo-sounder pings the water with a bouncing signal. The readings are ultimately decoded with software sophisticated enough to identify the presence of tiny sea creatures like krill.
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