Ocean plastic is creating new communities of life on the high seas
Coastal organisms thrive on floating plastic debris in the 'great pacific garbage patch'

Date:
December 2, 2021
Source:
Smithsonian
Summary:
Coastal plants and animals have found a new way to survive in the
open ocean -- by colonizing plastic pollution. A new commentary
reports coastal species growing on trash hundreds of miles out to
sea in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, more commonly known as
the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch.'


FULL STORY ========================================================================== Coastal plants and animals have found a new way to survive in the open
ocean - - by colonizing plastic pollution. A new commentary published
Dec. 2 in Nature Communications reports coastal species growing on trash hundreds of miles out to sea in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre,
more commonly known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

==========================================================================
"The issues of plastic go beyond just ingestion and entanglement," said
Linsey Haram, lead author of the article and former postdoctoral fellow
at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). "It's creating opportunities for coastal species' biogeography to greatly expand beyond
what we previously thought was possible." Gyres of ocean plastic form
when surface currents drive plastic pollution from the coasts into regions where rotating currents trap the floating objects, which accumulate over
time. The world has at least five plastic-infested gyres, or "garbage
patches." The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, between California and
Hawai'i, holds the most floating plastic, with an estimated 79,000 metric
tons of plastic floating in a region over 610,000 square miles. While
"garbage patch" is a misnomer -- much of the pollution consists of microplastics, too small for the naked eye to see -- floating debris
like nets, buoys and bottles also get swept into the gyres, carrying
organisms from their coastal homes with them.

A New Open Ocean The authors call these communities neopelagic. "Neo"
means new, and "pelagic" refers to the open ocean, as opposed to the
coast. Scientists first began suspecting coastal species could use plastic
to survive in the open ocean for long periods after the 2011 Japanese
tsunami, when they discovered that nearly 300 species had rafted all
the way across the Pacific on tsunami debris over the course of several
years. But until now, confirmed sightings of coastal species on plastic directly in the open ocean were rare.

For this discovery, Haram teamed up with Ocean Voyages Institute, a
nonprofit that collects plastic pollution on sailing expeditions, and
a pair of oceanographers from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The oceanographers, Jan Hafner and Nikolai Maximenko, created models that
could predict where plastic was most likely to pile up in the North
Pacific Subtropical Gyre. They shared that information with Ocean
Voyages Institute.



==========================================================================
One advantage of the institute, Haram -- now a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science -- pointed out, is the low
carbon footprint of its vessels. "It can take a lot of energy to get
out to the middle of the ocean with a gas-powered boat," she said. "So
they use large-cargo sailing vessels to go around and remove plastics
from the open ocean." During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic,
Ocean Voyages Institute founder Mary Crowley and her team managed to
collect a record-breaking 103 tons of plastics and other debris from
the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. She shipped some of those samples to
SERC's Marine Invasions Lab. There, Haram analyzed the species that had colonized them. She found many coastal species -- including anemones,
hydroids and shrimp-like amphipods -- not only surviving, but thriving,
on marine plastic.

A Sea of Questions For marine scientists, the very existence of this
"new open ocean" community is a paradigm shift.

"The open ocean has not been habitable for coastal organisms until now,"
said SERC senior scientist Greg Ruiz, who heads the Marine Invasions Lab
where Haram worked. "Partly because of habitat limitation -- there wasn't plastic there in the past -- and partly, we thought, because it was a
food desert." The new discovery shows that both ideas do not always hold
true. Plastic is providing the habitat. And somehow, coastal rafters are finding food. Ruiz said scientists are still speculating exactly how --
whether they drift into existing hot spots of productivity in the gyre, or because the plastic itself acts like a reef attracting more food sources.



==========================================================================
Now, scientists have another shift to wrestle with: How these coastal
rafters could shake up the environment. The open ocean has plenty of its
own native species, which also colonize floating debris. The arrival of
new coastal neighbors could disrupt ocean ecosystems that have remained undisturbed for millennia.

"Coastal species are directly competing with these oceanic rafters," Haram said. "They're competing for space. They're competing for resources. And
those interactions are very poorly understood." And then there is the invasive-species threat. Scientists have already seen that begin to play
out with Japanese tsunami debris, which carried organisms from Japan
to North America. Vast colonies of coastal species floating in the open
ocean for years at a time could act as a new reservoir, giving coastal
rafters more opportunities to invade new coastlines.

"Those other coastlines are not just urban centers....That opportunity
extends to more remote areas, protected areas, Hawaiian Islands, national parks, marine protected areas," Ruiz said.

The authors still do not know how common these "neopelagic" communities
are, whether they can sustain themselves or if they even exist outside
the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. But the world's dependence on plastic continues to climb. Scientists estimate cumulative global plastic waste
could reach over 25 billion metric tons by 2050. With fiercer and more
frequent storms on the horizon thanks to climate change, the authors
expect even more of that plastic will get pushed out to sea. Colonies
of coastal rafters on the high seas will likely only grow. This
long-overlooked side effect of plastic pollution, the authors said,
could soon transform life on land and in the sea.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Smithsonian. Note: Content may be
edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Linsey E. Haram, James T. Carlton, Luca Centurioni, Mary Crowley,
Jan
Hafner, Nikolai Maximenko, Cathryn Clarke Murray, Andrey
Y. Shcherbina, Verena Hormann, Cynthia Wright, Gregory
M. Ruiz. Emergence of a neopelagic community through the
establishment of coastal species on the high seas. Nature
Communications, 2021; 12 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021- 27188-6 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211202092930.htm

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