{"id":2556,"date":"2014-12-11T04:58:30","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T04:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=2556"},"modified":"2016-08-18T04:31:34","modified_gmt":"2016-08-18T04:31:34","slug":"in-the-ocean-the-most-harmful-plastic-is-too-small-to-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/in-the-ocean-the-most-harmful-plastic-is-too-small-to-see\/","title":{"rendered":"In the ocean, the most harmful plastic is too small to see"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Magnus Johnson<\/a>, University of Hull<\/a><\/em> and Melanie Coull<\/a>, University of Hull<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

There are at least 268,000 tonnes of plastic floating around in the oceans, according to new research<\/a> by a global team of scientists.<\/p>\n

The world generates 288m tonnes of plastic worldwide each year, just a little more than the annual vegetable crop<\/a>, yet using current methods only 0.1% of it is found at sea. The new research illustrates as much as anything, how little we know about the fate of plastic waste in the ocean once we have thrown it \u201caway\u201d.<\/p>\n

Where does it go?<\/h2>\n

Most obviously, this discarded plastic exists as the unsightly debris we see washed ashore on our beaches.<\/p>\n

These large chunks of plastic are bad news for sea creatures which aren\u2019t used to them. Turtles, for instance, consume plastic bags<\/a>, mistaking them for jellyfish. In Hawaii\u2019s outer islands the Laysan albatross feeds material skimmed from the sea surface<\/a> to its chicks. Although adults can regurgitate ingested plastic, their chicks cannot. Young albatrosses are often found dead with stomachs full of bottle tops, lighters and other plastic debris, having starved to death.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

An albatross chick rots away leaving behind the plastic in its stomach.<\/span>
\nChris Jordan<\/a>, CC BY-NC-ND<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

But these big, visible impacts may just be the tip of the iceberg. Smaller plastic chunks less than 2.5mm across \u2013 broken down bits of larger debris \u2013 are ubiquitous in zooplankton samples from the eastern Pacific<\/a>. In some regions of the central Pacific there is now six times as much plankton-sized plastic are there is plankton. Plankton-eating birds, fish and whales have a tough time telling the two apart, often mistaking this plastic \u2013 especially tan coloured particles \u2013 for krill.<\/p>\n

Zooming in further<\/h2>\n

However, even this doesn\u2019t quite tell the whole story. For technical reasons Eriksen and his team weren\u2019t able to consider the very smallest particles \u2013 but these may be the most harmful of all.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re talking here about tiny lumps of 0.5mm across or considerably less, usually invisible to the naked eye, which often originate in cosmetics or drugs containing nanoparticles or microbeads. Such nanoparticles matter as they are similar size to the smallest forms of plankton (pico and nano plankton) which are the most abundant plankton group<\/a> and biggest contributors in terms of biomass and contribution to primary production. There\u2019s a lot going on when you zoom right in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Who you calling plastic?<\/span>
\nNOAA<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t yet know precisely how plastic nanoparticles interact with marine fauna but we do know that they can be absorbed at the level of individual cells. And what\u2019s worse is they\u2019re very efficient carriers of organic molecules such as estradiol, the drug used for birth control and IVF that finds it way through our sewage system<\/a> into the sea. Indeed, this efficiency is one of the reasons nanoparticles are being explored for drug delivery<\/a> \u2013 they\u2019re a great way to get the right medicine absorbed into the right cells.<\/p>\n

Therefore it isn\u2019t just the plastic itself that should concern us. We need to look at what it\u2019s carrying, as substances clinging to nanoparticles of plastic could badly damage marine ecosystems.<\/p>\n

Nasty endocrine disrupting chemicals<\/a> can be concentrated a million times more than background levels on the surfaces of plastic particles. These can then be ingested by organisms and the chemicals absorbed leading to disruption of the reproductive process \u2013 some species such as bivalve mussels<\/a> have even seen males turned into females.<\/p>\n

Floating chunks of plastic can also be colonised by organisms including potential bacterial pathogens such as cholera<\/a>, and marine insect sea skaters<\/a> which need a hard surface to lay their eggs on \u2013 plastic in the sea increases their numbers and range. The fact that floating plastic debris is novel and persists for longer than most natural flotsam could make them ideal vehicles<\/a> for the introduction of invasive species with potentially devastating consequences.<\/p>\n

Plastic pollution of the marine environment is the Cinderella of global issues, garnering less attention than its ugly sisters climate change, acidification, fisheries, invasive species or food waste but it has links to them all and merits greater attention by the scientific community.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Magnus Johnson, University of Hull and Melanie Coull, University of Hull There are at least 268,000 tonnes of plastic floating around in the oceans, according to new research by a global team of scientists. The world generates 288m tonnes of plastic worldwide each year, just a little more than the annual vegetable crop, yet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":6503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[118],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2556"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6504,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions\/6504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}