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Microplastic fiber diet—Fiber-supplemented pellets for small fish
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Researchers developed a practical laboratory protocol for feeding microplastic fibers to small fish like sticklebacks by embedding the fibers uniformly into food pellets, solving a key challenge in exposure studies. This method enables more controlled experiments to determine what levels of microplastic fiber ingestion start to harm fish health and reproduction.
Ingestion of microplastic particles and fibers is frequently reported for aquatic organisms collected in the field. At the same time, only few studies investigate potential effects of ingestion of microplastic fibers due to handling issues in the laboratory. Exposure studies, which provide organisms with microplastic fibers via the diet, are a necessary step to analyze impact thresholds of vital and fitness parameters of aquatic organisms. Based on the limited number of studies providing fish with fiber-supplemented pellets, the following protocol presents a way to prepare a diet for fish that is supplemented with homogeneous distributed microplastic fibers for exposure studies. Produced pellets are suitable for small experimental fish, such as sticklebacks (2-5 cm), and can be manufactured up to amounts of several hundred grams and even few kilograms. The method can be adapted to different commercial fish feeds and microplastic fiber types due to manual preparation.•Low-cost, manual preparation of microplastic fibers•Preparation of a pelleted fish diet with uniformly distributed fibers•Adaptable to different commercial fish feeds and microplastic fiber types.
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Exposure of three-spined stickleback eggs and larvae to microplastic fibers at environmentally relevant concentrations had no significant effect on fertilization success, hatching rates, embryonic survival, or early larval development, suggesting that microplastic fibers alone may not impair early life stages of this species under realistic conditions.
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