Figure 2

Colour space triangles. The visual space of a tetrachromatic sea turtle can be represented as a tetrahedron (2A). Each vertex represents the contribution from a different cone. The lower left corner is the medium wavelength cone, the lower right corner is the UV wavelength cone, and the top vertex is the short wavelength cone. In order to portray a 3 dimensional image in a 2 dimensional space, we use colour to represent the contribution from the fourth vertex, the LWS cone (red is a strong contribution from the long wavelength, black is not). We plot the plastic from each beach sample (2B) and turtle sample (2C) on a separate triangle. Every dot is a single piece of plastic, and the closer the dot to the vertex, the greater the contribution from that cone. n = 20 for all samples except KAT 88 (n = 13), UWW 242 (n = 19), and UWW 350 (n = 9).