Dinner Plates (Northern Fulmar), 2015
Digital photographs

These images are part of a larger series called Seeing Like a Scientist. When we are doing plastic ingestion studies in the laboratory, we dissect animal gastrointestinal tracts to see what they’ve eaten. We’re looking for plastics, but a lot of things look like plastics. These images were taken in the lab during a study of Northern Fulmar from the Labrador Sea. All of the hard and plastic-like objects are removed from the bird’s guts, put in a petri dish, and analyzed under a microscope. This is what we see. Some is plastic, some is not.

There is very little artifice to these images. They are arranged more snuggly than they would normally be, but items are placed on the petri dish in the order they are removed from the bird. Some levels are adjusted so the image is clearer, but otherwise these are laboratory images.

Plastics wrapped around a squid beak found in a Northern Fulmar. 2015