Garbage pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch hosts communities of animals that normally live on shores
Citizen of the Planet/Alamy Stock Photo
Coastal marine life is found living and breeding in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch thousands of kilometers from its natural habitat. This discovery has the potential to rebuild our understanding of where coastal marine life can survive.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California, covers an estimated 1.6 million square kilometers of ocean and is a vast amount of waste, mostly plastic.
Researchers had previously found ocean-dwelling marine life inhabiting the patch’s perimeter, but now it appears that coastal creatures have also established permanent habitats there.
James Carlton of Connecticut’s Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum and his colleagues collected 105 pieces of plastic waste from a landfill between November 2018 and January 2019. Over 70% of his plastic products had evidence of inhabiting coastal species. Organisms such as shrimp-like arthropods, sea anemones, and mollusks have been identified. In fact, the team found that coastal species outnumbered pelagic species in the open ocean by a ratio of 3 to 1.
Coastal creatures seemed to live and thrive forever in the plastic patches, says Carlton. We have been successful in finding ground,” he says.
This finding overturns the assumption that coastal species cannot survive in the open ocean and helps solidify evidence that a new type of ecological ‘neopelagic community’ is colonizing plastic debris in the open ocean. “This has reset my thinking about how coastal species can survive in environments where they haven’t evolved,” says Carlton.
We still don’t know how this plastic ecosystem works, what coastal organisms eat, and how it interacts with the fish species that live in the ocean.
Carlton warns that such floating communities can pose a threat to coastal ecosystems. “We fully expect more coastal encroachment as a result of this,” he says.
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