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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

And so what happened is I started cutting open these specimens that had been preserved and

sitting in the museum collection for five or six years. And I just started, you know,

took a dribble tool, cut off the shell, opened it up, you know, looked at the stomach contents,

and I was shocked to find that in the 10 animals that I looked at, two of those 10 animals

had plastics in their stomach. Greg Pauley's original plan was to compare the diets of western

pond turtles native to the creeks of the UC Davis Arboretum with those of reddyred sliders that have

been introduced. But that all changed when the herpetologist from the Urban Nature Research Center

at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County began to look inside the sliders.

And then suddenly, I thought, oh man, there's a much bigger story here, which is that

that they're ingesting plastics, and we know almost nothing about plastic ingestion

in freshwater turtles. We know it's a huge issue in marine turtles, but no one's looking at this

in freshwater turtles. Plastic ingestion has been reported over and over again in each of the

world's seven types of sea turtles. But there is another 352 types of turtles, and only five studies

have ever concerned themselves with plastic ingestion in those species. That's despite the fact that

more than a half of all turtle species are considered threatened with extinction. Turtles are

...