In a new study published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday, a team of researchers revealed that dozens of species of coastal invertebrate organisms have been able to survive a…
published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday, a team of researchers revealed that dozens of species of coastal invertebrate organisms have been able to survive and reproduce on plastic garbage that’s been floating in the ocean for years.
“It was surprising to see how frequent the coastal species were. 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. “Quite a large percentage of the diversity that we found were coastal species and not the the native pelagic open ocean species that we were largely expecting to find,” Haram said.
“There’s likely competition for space, because space is at a premium in the open ocean, there’s likely competition for food resources — but they may also be eating each other. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but we have seen evidence of some of the coastal anemones eating open ocean species, so we know there is some predation going on between the two communities,” she said.
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. “You can think of it like the night sky. If you look up at night, you see all those white dots, that’s essentially what you see in the garbage patch. It’s not that dense, but there are a lot of them … out there, you start seeing more and more plastic the longer you look,” he said.
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