Day 3

 Today was a big day for Sam and I, we set out at 10am and went to woods hole to meet with multiple professionals, and the head of fundraising at WHOI. We met with Jim Flynn, who is the head fundraiser at WHOI and went out to lunch to just talk about what our goals are for this project and what our plan was after we get all the information from the scientists. After lunch we set out to meet with a senior scientist named Chris Reddy, we learned a lot about Chris and his past and how he got to be apart of WHOI, and then his assistant came over and they started nonstop talking about their projects that they've worked on. He mentioned a lot of chemistry vocabulary that was way above my vocabulary but essentially what he was talking about during our conversation with him and his assistant ( Brian ) was how plastics that enter the ocean essentially are decomposable, there are certain molecules that are inside plastic that the ocean can break down, and not only the ocean but Mother Nature, as he put it, he said that certain molecules that are in the plastics, the earth has already seen before, so the ocean lets say, knows how to break down that certain molecule. He also talked about how when mother nature doesn't know how to break something down, its a major problem of course, and he said that thats why we are here ( Chris and Brian ) we are here to figure out which plastics Mother Nature can handle and cannot, but not only that we are here because we design certain products ( he showed us a straw, many straws that he has and has been working on ) to modify them so that the earth can break it down in a certain amount of time. Chris also mentioned that Mother Nature lives on a different time scale than humans, what he meant by this is that mother nature ( as he kept saying ) is 100% fully able to break down certain plastics, but it takes a super long time for that to happen, and it isn't good for human health. So chris said that we are also seeing ways of making  and designing plastics that are able to break down within a time frame that is much more efficient for the world. He said that sunlight has a huge role in the break down of plastics constantly breaking it down. He mentioned that a red plastic solo cup that is used once and then thrown away takes a while to decompose, and there needs to be a solution to making that more efficient, so he said that making them even thinner than they are now will cause this product to decompose even faster, because it does fully decompose but just not as fast as it could be and have the same effect for humans. He talked about that if most plastic products sold in the market were made out of plastic that the sun and microbes would have an easy time breaking these products down and the pollution would be a lot less and cleaner. He also talked about a project he's been working on since 2021 with his assistant Brian, and how there was a massive ship wreck in Sri Lanka on the ship called "Xpress Pearl", he said that there was 200 billion nurdles that fell off the ship and went into the ocean, and 70 billion that were burned, ( nurdles are tiny pieces of plastic that when sent to a factory are what the plastics are made out of, they become heated up and molded into the shape of the plastic object ) he said that he was sent the first direct shipment of these "nurdles" that came ashore and started studying them to see how much the plastic will pollute the ocean. He says he's still studying it today. 

Sam and I then about an hour or so later went to meet with another scientist named Mark Hahn, Mark works more on the biology side of the micro plastics contaminating the ocean rather than the chemistry side like Chris R. Mark had a lot to say about how killi fish in the local buzzards bay adapted to PCB in the ocean and how since there life range is so short, that it was able to naturally select into the organism, which he found quite remarkable. He talked about the difference between micro plastics, nano plastics, and meso plastics. Mark talked about how the most common plastic to find in fish is mesoplastics, and micro plastics are also common but not as harmful or as large as mesoplastics. Mark talked a lot fo nano plastics because it not possible ( as of now ) to be able to find these plastics inside fish and ecosystems of fish because the plastics are so small in size, he referenced these plastics to be in similar size as a hemoglobin, sugar molecule, or even a virus. the micro plastics are more in the range of a red blood cell, or a human har or even sometimes bacteria. Then the meso plastics are things the size such as a zooplankton, or a larval fish, or even sometimes the size of a US dime. When Mark was talking about the killi fish and buzzards bay, he said it took them over 40 years to take out all of the PCB that was contaminated inside of the bay, the reason it was such a big deal was because when they measured this bay, it scaled at around 10 PCB, and that may seem like not that much, but... normally this scale should be reading in the thousandth he said, such as like 0.0001, and everyone was absolutely astonished on this discovery, which as he explained about the adaptation, that they learned that the killi fish adapted to this PCB and were then able to live in it over years and years of adaptation. We then wrapped it up with Mark and Jim brought us back and gave us a full tour of the WHOI campus and then we set off 6 hours later to come back home. We plan on going fishing later tonight to catch the stripers we weren't able to last night, and then bring these fish to URI where we will meet with more scientists and professors, and get our hands in a lab. 

here are some pictures from the experience at WHOI.