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Ali Shakoor took a break from his morning field work to lay two small bluegill in his palm, displaying the catch his colleagues had netted from a riffling nook of the Huron River.

The fish are opportunistic foragers. They fit squarely within the ecosystem in which Shakoor and a team Wayne State University researchers are searching for microplastics, a little-understood pollutant moving through Metro Detroit waterways and, likely, fish, animals and people as well.

"If microplastics are being moved by the fish, they're showing up in Lake Erie, people are catching those fish, and now those microplastics are making their way into humans," said Shakoor, a Wayne State doctoral candidate.

"They're carrying different types of chemicals, hormone disruptors, chemicals that are used in tire manufacturing plants. This gives us a critical view into other aspects that may be impacting human health because we're basically, I mean, it sounds dramatic, but we're kind of under assault from all sides."

Shakoor and his colleagues descended on a quiet stretch of the Huron River in Dexter Township's Hudson Mills Metropark recently to collect samples of air, water, sediment, algae, bugs and fish. They planned to do the same at another site along the river in Brighton at the Island Lake Recreation Area.

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