Last September, the Director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve in Port Aransas, Texas was walking along the beach when he came across a disturbing find -- millions of tiny, plastic pellets had washed ashore -- he’d stumbled across an apparent nurdle spill. Nurdles are tiny, plastic pellets that are used as the base material for the manufacture of other plastic products.
He estimated there were about a million nurdles per mile, and they stretched for more than 30 miles. So, after asking around and discovering there was nobody really monitoring for this, he initiated a citizen science initiative, called the Nurdle Patrol, to get help from everyday people to not only remove as many as possible from the beaches, but to collect data so researchers know where they’ve wound up, and how such a spill will be distributed by natural currents. We're joined that man: Jace Tunnell is Director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve. And, we're also joined by Maya Burke, she is Science Policy Coordinator with the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, and a volunteer nurdle hunter.
