Susanne Brander splits her time between teaching on OSU’s Corvallis campus and her research lab space in the brand-new Gladys Valley Marine Science Building in Newport OR at the OSU Hatfield Marine Science Center. I met her down in Newport for a tour of her microplastics analysis lab.
Collaborating with scientists from all over the world, she has a stockpile of samples to analyze, ranging from shark stomachs to lampreys and myctophids. “Why myctophids? And what are they?” I asked feeling somewhat ignorant. Myctophids are more commonly known as lanternfish for their ability to use bioluminescence. The reason that Susanne finds them useful for microplastic analysis is two-fold. According to Oceana, the 250+ species of myctophids make up the majority of the deep sea biomass. During the day, the school below 1000 feet, but migrate to the ocean surface at night – this action serves as a major biological carbon pump. From a microplastics standpoint, these tiny lanternfishes integrate exposure across most of the ocean depth. Secondly, lantern fish are available in museum collections, allowing graduate student Olivia Boisen to test specimens collected at different times and locations.
Susanne collaborates with The Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) for latest methods and quality assurance. SQCWRP is busy working on standardizing laboratory methods to help accreditors determine which labs are doing MP analysis proficiently, and also on what more we need to learn about the exposure and effects of microplastics on aquatic life. Susanne’s process uses potassium hydroxide to digest tissues followed by FTIR to identify materials, but does not use Nile Red staining, as she finds it to non-specific, staining many more particle types than plastics alone.
When I asked her about the difficulty of finding reliable spectra libraries for field microplastics, she told me about Open Specy – an open sourced, free collection of spectra of microplastics for both Raman and FTIR analysis. Her group finds better matches using Open Specy than any other library. Developed by Win Cowger, you can learn more about Open Specy in this American Chemical Society article introduced the database.
Susanne is on the scientific team starting to examine the effects of tire wear particles (TWPs). She is exposing mysid shrimp, more commonly known as opossum shrimp, to TWPs. She chose the mysids because of their presence in both open ocean and brackish waters. She is focusing on their behavior – each on in its own well on a 96-well plate using Noldus’s Ethovision software. What do you look for to tell if opossum shrimp experience behavioral modification? Either they “hug the wall” if they are anxious, or “freeze” more as they stop and check out water is novel or changed in the water. Graduate students Lauren Kashiwabara, Clarissa Raguso, and recently graduated PhD Sara Hutton all use behavioral toxicity as a way to study responses to plastics and other environmental stressors.
Susanne is also part of the Canadian Arctic MP group that is doing the whole-lake experiment (along with Mathew Hoffman at RIT, who I met with earlier). One piece of this study to keep your eyes out for in a few years time is whether MPs can affect the methylation patterns of the epigenome of yellow perch. This would be significant because it would mean that MP damage could be heritable.
Susanne is also involved in MP outreach at the Visitor Center at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. One planned exhibit focuses on how MPs could affect lactating whales as they make their way from washing machines to oceans to zooplankton and into filter-feeding whales. You can read more about the connection between laundry and microplastic pollution in this New York Times article, Your Laundry Sheds Harmful Microfibers. Here’s What You Can Do About It.
The article, and the exhibit, also include ways to reduce this pathway by using a CoraBall that catches over 30% of the fibers in a washing machine load. I tried a Coraball once and found that it also catches every drawstring and strap in my load of laundry. Susanne uses a Fitrol filter at home, and a mesh bag on her dryer vent too, and has had no problems. I need to get one of those instead! In fact, we may all be moving in this direction, According to Fibre2Fashion, “France has already shown leadership as the first country in the world to mandate microfibre filters on washing machines from 2025. California has also introduced a microfibre filtration bill that mandates all new washing machines sold in the state to contain a microfibre filtration system with a mesh size no greater than 100 micrometres from 2029. The EU strategy now aims to introduce similar mandates to reduce microplastic pollution.
Along with Sami Romanick, Susanne is clearly one of the researchers to go to if you want your birds, bats, beetles or bison tissue analyzed for MPs. As Susanne commented, “people are always bringing us smelly fish.”