Plastic Home: How the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now thriving with life

One wouldn’t think of a mass of plastic being a hospitable environment for living organisms. However, scientists have found that it is now home to communities of coastal creatures, including tiny crabs and anemones, living thousands of miles from their original home on plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

These creatures — sea anemones, white bryozoa, hydroids sprouting like orange feathers, shrimplike amphipods, Japanese oysters and mussels — don’t belong on a chunk of plastic, but yet they have all somehow learned to survive in the open sea, clinging to plastic.

We take a deep dive into what exactly is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, what scientists found and what is the impact of the new findings.

What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

Before we go deeper into the new study, let’s understand what is this mass of plastic. As its name suggests, it is a big, big, big soupy swirl of garbage, ranging from microscopic pieces of plastic to larger objects such as fishing nets and buoys.

Also known as the Pacific trash vortex, it spans waters from the West Coast of North America to Japan. Reef Conservation International, a volunteer organisation committed to saving our oceans, says the best way of visualising ‘The Patch’ is to imagine a big soup floating in the ocean like oil does.

Conservationists and experts state that it is about 1.6 million square kilometres in size. To put that in perspective, it is thrice the size of France. It also said to weigh seven million tonnes.

A National Geographic report states that while oceanographers and climatologists predicted the existence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it was a racing boat captain by the name of Charles Moore who actually discovered the trash vortex. Moore was sailing from Hawaii to California after competing in a yachting race. Crossing the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, Moore and his crew noticed millions of pieces of plastic surrounding his ship.

While there are estimates of the patch containing 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic , no one knows just how much debris makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That’s because not all of the plastic is visible and it is just too large to trawl. Experts state that 80 per cent of the plastic in the patch comes from land-based sources while the remaining comes from boats and other marine sources. However, these percentages vary — a 2018 study found that synthetic fishing nets made up nearly half the mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The cause of the ‘patch’ is the world’s high and unnecessary plastic use and more so, the methods of disposing these plastics. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has stated that at least 14 million tonnes of plastic end up in the ocean every year. This plastic pollution is a big threat to marine species — they either ingest it or are entangled by it, which causes severe injuries and death.

The situation has gotten so bad that marine animals have no other option but to consume these pieces of plastic and ultimately end up dead. But now it seems that they are becoming a new home to marine animals.

A new plastic home

A new study carried out by Linsey Haram and her team from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) found that coastal plants and animals have found a new way to survive in the open ocean — by colonising plastic pollution. In the study published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal, they revealed that dozens of species of coastal invertebrate organisms have been able to survive and reproduce on the plastic patch.

Haram, the lead on the study, was quoted as saying, “This is creating opportunities for coastal species’ biogeography to greatly expand beyond what we previously thought was possible.”

Haram and her colleagues examined 105 items of plastic fished out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between November 2018 and January 2019. They identified 484 marine invertebrate organisms on the debris, accounting for 46 different species, of which 80 per cent were normally found in coastal habitats.

“Quite a large percentage of the diversity that we found were coastal species and not the native pelagic open ocean species that we were largely expecting to find,” Haram said. They, however, did find a lot of open species, with Haram adding, ““On two thirds of the debris, we found both communities together… competing for space, but very likely interacting in other ways.”

The team also found that these species were not just there temporarily but were also reproducing and thriving there. They found tiny baby anemones budding off anemones and female crustaceans carrying little broods of eggs.

What this means for the future

The study is a revelation and indeed a surprise. This means the plastic mass being inhospitable to coastal-dwelling species has now become a home to them.

For marine scientists, the very existence of this “new open ocean” community is a paradigm shift. The new discovery shows that plastic is providing the habitat. Plastic is already transforming marine ecosystems in unsettling ways, and if coastal invertebrates venture out to sea aboard rafts of floating debris they might begin “fundamentally altering” oceanic communities, Haram and colleagues warn.

Sabine Rech, a marine biologist with the Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile, who has studied life on ocean garbage in the South Pacific, was quoted as telling NPR, “Beyond the surprise, I think the implications could be huge.”

She added that this could increase the risk of species finding new places to take hold and become invasive. Moreover, she said that the idea that coastal species are able to make a go of it out at sea if they just have something durable to anchor onto is “a little revolution” in scientists’ thinking. “It’s a bit scary,” she said, as well as fascinating.

The scientists said this is proof that nature is just finding a way to survive in turbulent times. “Our results demonstrate that the oceanic environment and floating plastic habitat are clearly hospitable to coastal species,” they concluded.

With inputs from agencies

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