National Geographic
April 16, 2021
By Carrie Arnold
As volunteers who spend every Sunday removing garbage from canals crisscrossing the Dutch city of Leiden, Liselotte Rambonnet and Auke-Florian Hiemstra have seen more than their fair share of litter.
But even the ecology Ph.D. students’ vast experience with urban detritus didn’t prepare them for what they stumbled across last August.
A finger-size perch had gotten trapped in the thumb of a disposable medical glove, where it died.