Saturday [April 2] at dawn usually sees members of the Conolly family combining morning exercise with civic service in the Colliers community. “We gather at my house and walk down to Morritt’s on one side and back on the other, picking trash as we go” explained MacFarlane Conolly, East End representative on the National Conservation Council.   This past Saturday the group accepted a new challenge, to conduct a Beach Plastics Survey in the district to provide data for a Caribbean-wide study of density of beach plastic debris on inhabited and uninhabited Caribbean Islands.   The team, Mac’s wife, Mrs Babry Conolly, his sister Mrs Aliceann Kirchman, and her daughter Ms Mideya Elliott, joined the NCC Chair, Christine Rose-Smyth, to make a contribution to the crowd-sourced project being led by Dr Jennifer Lavers of the Institute of Marine & Antarctic Studies, Australia.

“The call for assistance reached us through the BirdsCaribbean Yahoo group” said Ms Rose-Smyth, “and I thought that the Conservation Council was uniquely positioned to encourage surveys in each of the districts where we have representatives. East End was our trial run and it worked perfectly.” She added: “By sampling in each of the three Cayman Islands we can provide important insight into the question of where beach plastics and other floating debris comes from because of our widely differing populations sizes on the three islands and also because of our position in the western Caribbean. “

The citizen-scientists surveyed a 20 x 2 meter transect at Colliers, beyond the reach of the well-groomed Public Beach. 413 pieces of plastics and 46 other man-made items were recovered. Small and medium plastic fragments were found at a rate of 5 per square meter, followed in abundance by Styrofoam fragments from picnic plates and food containers. Two of nine plastic bottles found could be identified as originating from Haiti. “I have noticed that Haitian plastics are common on Cayman Brac and Little Cayman beaches as well and I hope that we will be able to obtain some precise data from both of those Islands during this study. There is clearly both an international and a local dimension to the litter on our shores,” Christine said, “in addition to the humanitarian and public health crisis that waste is causing in Haiti itself.”

To illustrate the vast scale of the marine litter problem, it is estimated that there are 5 trillion items currently floating in the surface layer (top 10 cm) and an estimated 275 million tonnes of new plastic accidentally or intentionally entering the world’s oceans every year, according to Dr Lavers.

The National Conservation Council is calling on civic action groups to get involved in the project as part of Cayman’s Earth Month clean-up initiatives. A survey can be conducted ahead of, or alongside, a planned beach cleanup. The technique is simple and the only equipment needed is a 20 meter (66.75 feet) line and some 1 and 2 meter long sticks to mark out the survey site. Full details of the project and data recording sheets can be found on the Conservation Council’s News page on the DoE website (www.doe.ky).   “We found that a pair of investigators on each side of the transect line worked well, with a data recorder in each pair, but a single person can perform a survey too. After the plastics and other debris were identified and recorded we bagged and photographed it at the end of the survey.” said Ms. Rose-Smyth.

The Beach Plastics Surveys can be carried out up until 30 April for inclusion in the full Caribbean data analysis. Please contact the Conservation Council at email [email protected] with questions, to notify us of your group and where you will be conducting your survey, and to send us picture and results.

Photos:

1. Conolly Family at Colliers following the completed survey. Left to right: Mideya Elliott, Aliceann Kirchman, MacFarlane Conolly, Babry Conolly.
2. Conducting the survey.