Scientist using a Sharpie to label Petri plates.
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The Mystery of the Disappearing Labels

Microplastics researcher Krista Beardy learned the hard way that sunlight and Sharpies don’t mix.

Hannah Thomasy, PhD headshot
| 2 min read
Image credit© istock.com, aorphoto
Krista Beardy stands next to a microscope wearing a white lab coat.
Krista Beardy studies microplastic pollution in marine environments at the University of New Brunswick.
Krista Beardy

I am a researcher at the University of New Brunswick studying microplastic pollution, primarily in the Bay of Fundy region. For the past few years, I’ve been collecting samples so that I can analyze the contamination in sediment and in local bivalve communities. After I process the samples, I place them on Petri slides labeled with black Sharpie and store them in clear plastic bins.

For a while, this system worked well. Then a new graduate student joined the lab, so I moved these boxes to another shelf, which happened to be near a window. I left the samples there for a few months, until September 2024, when we received funding to run further analyses on them. But when I went to get the box, I noticed something was very wrong. There were there no labels on my samples! The sunlight had destroyed about 80 percent of the labels, so I was left with mostly blank slides.

My brain started spinning. I consulted Google to figure out how to make the labels visible again. Since Sharpie is a chemical itself, I thought it might leave some sort of residue, so I searched for residues under the microscope using different lights. But I couldn't find a thing. I had wanted to isolate the plastic particles from the samples and send them for spectrographic analysis to identify what types of polymers were present. As I couldn’t do that without the labels, I lost this information from the last year of the project. Eventually, I had to fess up.

Fortunately, my supervisor—marine ecologist Heather Hunt—is wonderful and so are my coworkers; everyone was very understanding. They just said, “lesson learned,” and we moved on. It’s great to work in an environment where we are able to make mistakes and feel comfortable enough to talk about them. It not only promotes a healthier workplace, but it also leads to better science. I’ve noticed that many of the younger graduate students are terrified of messing up, which is a problem because if someone in the lab makes a mistake and they’re too afraid to report it, the data could end up getting lost or changed. So, it benefits everyone if we accept that mistakes are a normal part of the learning process.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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