![]() (AP Photo/Eric Risberg) Oceans of plastic The ship returned with the plastics from the ocean after 45 days in the area more commonly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” The plastics are to be recycled, upcycled and repurposed. A crew member of the Ocean Voyages Institute sailing cargo ship Kwai prepares a bag of plastics and debris to be lifted from a hold during unloading in Sausalito, Calif., Wednesday, July 27, 2022. Whether, for example, they were just hitching a ride on a piece of plastic they attached themselves to by the coast, or whether they were able to colonize new objects once they were in the open ocean, is unknown. How exactly the creatures get to the open ocean and how they survive there remains unclear. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but we have seen evidence of some of the coastal anemones eating open ocean species, so we know there is some predation going on between the two communities,” she said. ![]() “There’s likely competition for space, because space is at a premium in the open ocean, there’s likely competition for food resources - but they may also be eating each other. Haram said that the consequences of the introduction of new species into the remote areas of the ocean are not yet fully understood. They identified 484 marine invertebrate organisms on the debris, accounting for 46 different species, of which 80% were normally found in coastal habitats. Haram and her colleagues examined 105 items of plastic fished out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between November 2018 and January 2019. They were on 70% of the debris that we found,” Linsey Haram, a science fellow at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the study’s lead author, told CNN. “It was surprising to see how frequent the coastal species were. Unlike organic material that decomposes and sinks within months or, at most, a few years, plastic debris can float in the oceans for a much longer time, giving creatures the opportunity to survive and reproduce in the open ocean for years. The scientists said that the findings suggest plastic pollution in the ocean might be enabling the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that are not normally able to survive in the open ocean. In a new study published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal on Monday, a team of researchers revealed that dozens of species of coastal invertebrate organisms have been able to survive and reproduce on plastic garbage that’s been floating in the ocean for years. Scientists have found thriving 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 - a 620,000 square mile swirl of trash in the ocean between California and Hawaii.
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