plastic
News from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Imagine you’re in a dimly lit Italian restaurant. Famished, you take the first bite of a juicy eggplant parmesan dinner, and it turns out to be a big hunk of plastic. (Yuk.)
That’s the reality for fish in an area of the ocean known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where fish are mistaking their food sources with a growing amount of floating trash.
Two graduate students at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Pete Davison and Rebecca Asch, joined the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition, or SEAPLEX, where they found evidence of plastic waste in more than 9 percent of the stomachs of fish collected during their voyage to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The mid-water fishes contained plastic debris, primarily broken-down bits smaller than a human fingernail.
"That is an underestimate of the true ingestion rate because a fish may regurgitate or pass a plastic item, or even die from eating it. We didn't measure those rates, so our 9 percent figure is too low by an unknown amount," said Davison.
Based on these rates of ingestion, they estimate that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tons per year, but the real number could be much higher.
Miriam Goldstein Talks Trash
Over the weekend I attended ScienceOnline2010, a raucous gathering (if conferences can be raucous) of scientists and journalists. I met some great folks, including Miriam Goldstein -- one of my favorite ocean bloggers -- of Oyster's Garter fame. (She also recently joined the salty bloggers over at Deep Sea News.)
Miriam was the chief scientist for last summer's Scripps SEAPLEX expedition to the Pacific garbage patch. As if being chief scientist weren't enough, she also blogged and tweeted the journey. And as she hilariously illustrates in this story from one of the first days of the expedition in the California Current, sometimes science doesn't like to be live. (Apologies in advance for my, um, budding video skills.)
The SEAPLEX expedition received a ton of press attention. So after the session, I asked her, "Has the media overblown the pacific garbage patch?" She said, "Well, yes, in a way. There is no 'island' of trash -- the ocean is homogeneous. But it is also way, way worse than we thought."
Look out for the results of the SEAPLEX expedition later on in 2010.
Miriam Goldstein Talks Trash from Oceana on Vimeo.
