Plastic Surgery: Could Microplastics Change The Face of Fishing?
THE MAN DREW headlines three years ago. In 2017, Andreas Fath decided to swim the course of the Tennessee River. Along his 652-mile route, Fath navigated Fort Loudon, Chickamauga, Watts Bar, Nickajack, Guntersville, Wheeler, Wilson, Pickwick and Kentucky lakes. His goal? To discover how much humans were impacting the water quality of the river by sampling it — in search of microplastics.
Fath, a physical chemist from Furtwangen University, a college of applied science located near the Black Forest in Germany, covered about 20 miles per day, often swimming for eight hours at a time. En route, he collected water samples along the course of bass fishing’s most storied waterway. Using a portable spectrometer — essentially, a small cage connected to his wetsuit — Fath was able to analyze the data. The goal? Trace contaminants that are too small to see with the naked eye.
Two years later, Fath’s data remains some of the most detailed available on microplastics in American freshwater fisheries. His
