Coastal Organisms Thrive on Floating Plastic Debris in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
by Kristen Goodhue
Watch: Marine biologist Linsey Haram describes how she studies life floating on plastic pollution that nonprofits and citizen scientists collect from the Pacific Ocean.
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.”