We don't know the actual number of all the islands, but it's probably in the hundreds of thousands. Researchers have discovered one more. It's just scary.
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In the Pacific Ocean floats the Great Pacific Garbage Island, made up mostly of microplastics rather than large pieces of trash.
This area doesn't just sit idle in the water. New research has shown that the waste harbors small ecosystems of coastal species, which are carried there by currents. And when litter reaches shores, these species can invade other ecosystems, spread and basically take them over.
Some species can reproduce and dominate others, which can disrupt the balance of the food chain and bring about consequences that we cannot even imagine.
Scientists have known for a long time that worms, crustaceans and molluscs can make shelter on plastic debris. Some animals even crossed the Pacific Ocean on these makeshift rafts after a devastating tsunami hit Japan in 2011.
“The surface of the seas is probably one of the least known environments,” says Martin Thiel, a marine biologist at the Catholic University of the North in Chile. “It's a very, very particular community that lives there that we're disrupting now”
The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – located in the northern Pacific Ocean “collects” approximately 79,000 metric tons of plastic debris. The scientists identified 484 invertebrates from a surprising range of species on the plastic. These coastal species included “muscle animals” or bryozoans, jellyfish, sponges, worms, and other organisms.
“I remember the first time I pulled out a piece of plastic and saw the amount of coastal species present, I was just blown away,” says Linsey Haram, lead author of the study. Haram, who was a research associate at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center during the study, specializes in marine ecology.
The scientists found that about two-thirds of the debris fragments housed coastal and open-ocean species living side by side. Plastic doesn't just carry coastal species out to sea; but also creates unnatural neighborhoods that researchers call “neopelagic communities.”
“We're basically creating new communities in the open ocean,” says Haram, who found signs that these coastal species were reproducing. For example, they found insect-like arthropods that laid eggs and anemones that produced small clones of themselves – indicators that suggest plastic-assisted “relocations” are not necessarily temporary. And plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch doesn't necessarily stay there, but can be brought to foreign beaches, where transplanted species could take root.
“If you can reproduce, then you can spread. And if you can spread, you can invade,” says Linda Amaral-Zettler, a marine microbiologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Maritime Research
