Ava DeFrancesco is the Winner of the 2024 Skoch Scholarship – Cyber Tech

Every year, Florida Sea Grant selects an impressive highschool senior competing within the State Science and Engineering Truthful of Florida to obtain the Chuck Skoch Scholarship  The scholarship acknowledges promising younger researchers in coastal or marine science-related fields. Funding for the scholarship is supplied by the Skoch household of Boynton Seashore, in reminiscence of Charles “Chuck” Skoch, an avid fisherman, boat captain, and Florida resident. 

This 12 months’s scholarship was awarded to Ava DeFrancesco, a senior at Edgewood Junior Senior Excessive College in Merritt Island, Florida. For her award-winning challenge, DeFrancesco targeted on quantifying the distinction in plastics discovered within the gastrointestinal tract in comparison with the flesh of various fish.

“Earlier than my tenure on the College of Florida and Florida Sea Grant, I processed over 4,000 fish stomachs, so Ava’s science truthful challenge instantly piqued my curiosity after I noticed fish guts on her show,” says Brittany Corridor-Scharf, UF/IFAS Florida Sea Grant Extension Agent in Hernando County and Florida Sea Grant consultant within the Skoch Scholarship choice course of. 

“As somebody who additionally loves fish and realizing Chuck Skoch’s ardour was for fishing, I felt Ava’s challenge was an ideal tribute to his reminiscence, making her a deserving recipient of this scholarship.” 

For her analysis, DeFrancesco retrieved three varieties of fish from an area market: mullet, white grunt, and sheepshead. The analysis concerned taking samples from the flesh across the tail space, the abdomen, and the massive gut. 

“Rising up in Melbourne, Florida, simply 25 minutes away from the seaside, I developed a love for fish and contemporary seafood,” says DeFrancesco. “With the growing publicity of microplastic air pollution and its results on marine life, I needed to analyze if these plastics might switch to people by way of consumption. I needed to see if the gastrointestinal tract had extra microplastics than the flesh.” 

DeFrancesco used hydrogen peroxide to dissolve the fats within the tissue, then funneled the samples by way of a espresso filter with distilled water. After drying the samples for one to 2 weeks to keep away from mistaking moisture for microplastics, she counted the particles utilizing a microscope and pressed down on every particle with a micro-probe to see if it could break, signaling it was natural matter and never microplastics. 

Her findings revealed that mullets had the very best ranges of microplastics in each the gastrointestinal tract and flesh. Surprisingly, sheepshead, which she anticipated to have excessive ranges on account of their food plan of crabs, confirmed decrease microplastic content material than mullets and grunts.