Abstract
That-Luang swamp is a place that the habitants nearby earn their living by fishery and harvest plats for consumption and to distribute in daily. It is also an area to accommodate the waste water which released from factories and Vientiane capital; consequently, microplastics might be one of the contaminants and it would be bio-accumulation on food chain of aquatic animals; while the citizen have earned their living includes: fishing, prawn, snail and collect plants to consume and vend at the market. Therefore, microplastics contaminable in aquatic animals could be bio-magnification via the food chain to the human body.
There are two main objectives in this research. Firstly, to study the physical quality which consist of colors, shapes and sizes of microplastics contaminants in three kinds of fish (including: small fish, tilapias and kind of flat fish). Secondly, to examine for microplastics species in that of the fish; the aquatic animal samples were carried out to extract the microplastic at the laboratory, then the colors, shapes, and sizes of the microplastic were analyzed by employing the Stereo Microscope; Finally, the species of microplastic were elucidated using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). According to the analysis result revealed that there are many microplastics contaminated in aquatic animals; we found 111 pieces of microplastic in a total of 12 fish, it had 6 colors including: black 44 (40%), red 27 (24%), blue 25 (23%), yellow 8 (7%), green (4%), and white 3 (3%); 3 microplastics shapes includes: fiber 56 (50%), sheet 52 (47%) and foam 3 (3%); the size of microplastics were range between 0.01µm – 0.65 µm, and 10 types of microplastics. As the results of the studies on both physicals and its species in three types of fish, the amount of contaminated microplastic was stratified from Henicorhynchus siamensis, Trichopodus trichopterus, Oreochromis niloticus respectively.