The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Discovery of 84 Marine Bioorganisms in the Open Ocean by Haram and her Coworkers
Haram and her colleagues studied 105 pieces of plastic fished out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They were able to identify 484 marine organisms on the debris, accounting for 46 of which are normally found in coastal habitats.
The scientists said that the findings suggest plastic pollution in the ocean might be enabling the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that are not normally able to survive in the open ocean.
It was surprising to see how much the coastal species were on a regular basis. They were on 70% of the debris that we found,” Linsey Haram, a science fellow at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the study’s lead author, told CNN.
The neighbors may compete for food and eat each other. The researchers spotted coastal anemones that were eating a kind of purple snail that’s native to the high seas.
How exactly the creatures get to the open ocean and how they survive there remains unclear. It’s unclear whether they were just hitching a ride on a piece of plastic they attached themselves to by the coast or if they were able to colonize new objects once they were in the open ocean.
Ocean Cleanup and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: What is the impact of the oceans around coral reefs, marine life, and their environment?
The patch is bounded by an enormous gyre – the biggest of five huge, spinning circular currents in the world’s oceans that pull trash towards the center and trap it there, creating a garbage vortex.
Haram and her colleagues decided to sample some of the garbage in the Pacific with help of a nonprofit that went to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in November and January of 2019.
“If you’re out there, what you see is just pristine blue ocean,” said Egger, who helped Haram’s research by collecting the samples in the patch, fishing them out with a net.
“You can think of it like the night sky. You can see all those white dots if you look up at night. You start to see more plastic as you look, but it is not that dense.
The Ocean Cleanup initiative estimates that there are about 800 billion pieces of plastic in the patch. The majority of the plastic found in the patch comes from the fishing industry, while between 10% and 20% of the total volume can be traced back to the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
Globally, only around 9% of plastic waste is recycled, according to UNEP. Large amounts of plastic waste end up in the ocean due to the fact that as much as 22% of it is mismanaged.
The problem is getting bigger and bigger with each passing minute. Turtles are entangled in fishing nets. Sometimes it’s even just turtle carcasses. We see ingestion of plastic fragments. Then there’s also the pollutants – chemicals.”
The Ocean Cleanup has built a huge trash-collecting system, a U-shaped barrier with a net-like skirt that hangs below the surface of the water. As the plastic moves by, it moves with the current.
We want to look at what the impact is on the marine life. And once we know for sure that it’s safe and it benefits the environment, then we want to scale up,” Egger said.
Scientists had concluded that coastal species weren’t able to live out at sea or establish new communities there because they can sometimes travel on ships or floating debris.
The temperature, water quality, and available minerals in these environments were all seen as potential deal-breakers.
Born and Born – Like anemones in the Pacific Ocean as evidences of a Little Revolution in Marine Biologist’s Thinking
Marine biologists had to rethink their assumptions after the March 2011 Tohoku disaster in Japan. Identifiable junk from Japan started coming to Hawaii years later, carrying coastal species that had somehow survived.
The plastic trash items the researchers asked for were buckets, crates, bottles, household items, ropes and parts of fish traps. “And then we had a wild-card category, which was if they came across anything that was super weird and interesting but couldn’t necessarily be categorized otherwise,” explains Haram.
“Definitely anemones were the weirdest thing that we saw. Haram said they didn’t expect to see them because they didn’t have a big signature on the Japanese debris work.
She says they must now be interacting because over two-thirds of the time, they were living on the same piece of trash.
Haram says the findings from this study may have implications for animals higher up in the food chain, like turtles, fish, and marine mammals.
“With the latest research, we see that it’s just something that is normal now, that is happening all the time,” says Rech. “Coastal species are traveling on a regular basis, all the time, away from their habitat.”
That could increase the risk of species finding new places to take hold and become invasive, she says, adding that the idea that coastal species are able to make a go of it out at sea if they just have something durable to anchor onto is “a little revolution” in scientists’ thinking.
When she and her colleagues looked at pieces of debris from the South Pacific, they didn’t see many different kinds of life, but she thinks it is because the environment is more harsh.