The research team led by professor Hung Ching-chang (洪慶章), head of the school’s College of Marine Sciences, studied 14 batches of dried fish to examine if they were contaminated by microplastics.

It found that a type of round herring species caught off Japan’s southeastern coast was the most contaminated of all the samples.

The team attributed the results to East Asian waters around Japan being hotspots for microplastics, with a concentration one order of magnitude higher than the rest of the world’s oceans.

The study found that 75.9 percent of the samples of round herring from Japan, known formally as Etrumeus micropus, contained microplastics.