Plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean creates a new habitat for coastal animals
More than 40 animal species live in the garbage patch in the middle of the ocean. A Swiss environmental scientist explains why the discovery is both surprising and “extremely disturbing”.
Floating debris forms the basis of a new ecosystem: a diver in the ghost web of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Photo: Justin Hoffman (Greenpeace)
At first glance, the results of the study published on Monday appear positive: the 80,000 tons of plastic floating in the North Pacific Garbage Patch (the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) is home to a wealth of marine organisms. Scientists have found 484 marine invertebrates from 46 different species that have adapted to plastic waste and made it a new home.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located off the west coast of the United States, is formed by circular ocean currents and covers an area of 1.6 million square kilometers. According to a study conducted by Nature»Objects larger than 5 centimeters make up three-quarters of the mass: they consist of fishing nets, buckets, plastic bottles, clothes rails or toilet lids. Microplastics less than 5 millimeters in size account for 8 percent of the mass of plastic waste in the North Pacific garbage patch.
Small pieces of plastic float like tiny flakes near the surface of the water. Thus, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not an island of plastic, as it is often erroneously called, but rather a murky soup of smaller and larger pieces of plastic. Therefore, it cannot be seen from space. Unlike larger plastic waste, which usually floats on the surface of the water, microplastics sink slowly into the deep sea and pollute the ecosystem there, which we don’t fully understand yet.
Industrial fisheries waste: Most of the waste floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of nets and ropes.
Photo: ocean cleanup
Between November 2018 and January 2019, scientists collected 105 pieces of plastic waste, including nets, floats, plastic buckets and toothbrushes. They photographed the pieces of plastic and froze them. Then they examined pieces of animal life at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in California and Maryland.
Coastal animals of the high seas
80 percent of the creatures the researchers found usually live near the shore, according to the scientists in their study published in the journal “nature and its evolutionPublish and write. Among the animals collected are Japanese coast crabs, sponges, worms, barnacles, cnidarians and sea anemones, as well as the expected mussels. Marine ecologists actually predicted that coastal species would only appear sporadically outside their natural habitat and would have to struggle to survive.
On floating bits of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they have now found animals thriving and reproducing: “The surprising thing is that coastal animals are so widespread so far. Until now, it was thought that coastal organisms had a hard time surviving in the open sea.” That said, on 70 percent of the pieces of plastic we collected, we found organisms from coastal regions that were not only surviving, but were also growing and reproducing,” says Swiss ecologist Matthias Egger, co-author of the study and head of the Department of Environment and Social Affairs at The nonprofit organization The Ocean Cleanup, told Tamedia.
Populated by life: The feathery-looking Aglaophenia pluma, better known as a sea fern, fills a piece of plastic the researchers collected as part of the study.
Photo: ocean cleanup
In the open sea, the studied animals feed on things including plankton, tiny jellyfish, tiny snails or, in the case of crabs, coastal algae that grow on plastic waste. In two-thirds of the plastic waste collected, the researchers found both naturally occurring pelagic species and migratory coastal species. Many of them come from East and Southeast Asia. Researchers have found that Pacific oysters, or orange anemones, are native to the coast of Japan. Scientists hypothesize that the animals were sucked into the ocean with the Tohoku tsunami in 2011 and thus ended up in the North Pacific garbage patch.
Migratory species compete with marine species for space and food. Researchers have found sea anemones feeding on snails that live in the open sea. So new communities could evolve at the expense of traditional open ocean dwellers who were already suffering from a lack of food. However, the exact dynamics between introduced coastal species and marine species has not been investigated in detail yet.
Distribution of invasive species
Despite the adaptability of coastal species where they migrated, Egger considers the environmental consequences of habitat change to be a major problem: “This is very worrying. Bringing an invasive species into a new ecosystem has very serious consequences for coexistence there. This is a warning signal that they should be removed.” plastic as quickly as possible so that the influx of coastal organisms can be stopped as soon as possible.”
Plastic waste is also a major problem for larger animal species on the high seas: Birds are dying from ingesting so much plastic because they can’t digest it or excrete it again. Sea turtles get entangled in nets, fish and whales eat microplastics, and plastic waste itself releases toxins as it decomposes. Iger hopes that the nonprofit organization The Ocean Cleanup can rid the North Pacific garbage patch of plastic waste in the next 10 to 20 years with a specially developed collection system reminiscent of Pac-Man.
It’s like Pac-Man: The Ocean Cleanup wants to rid the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of plastic waste using a large-scale collection system.
Photo: ocean cleanup
As plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is also washed up on beaches, despite swirling ocean currents, where waste-living coastal dwellers previously were not at home, there is also a risk of introducing invasive species into other ecosystems: if they can be bred Coastal species, they can spread. If they can spread, they can invade new habitats, said Linda Amaral-Zettler, a marine microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, who was not involved in the new study. to Scientific American». The marine microbiologist hopes the new study serves as a warning that plastic can facilitate the entry of species, particularly among widespread coastal ecosystems.
Microplastics exacerbate global warming
Meanwhile, Egger points to another serious problem caused by plastic pollution in the oceans. There are indications that the interaction of microplastics in the sea with the algae and plankton that live there means the ocean can absorb less carbon dioxide. We are currently investigating the impact of this on the climate. How might microplastics found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch affect the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Since the sea is one of the largest reservoirs of carbon dioxide, which is deposited in the deep sea, this is the most important.”
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