(CNN) Scientists have found thriving communities of coastal creatures, including tiny crabs and anemones, living thousands of miles from their original habitat in the plastic waste of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a 620,000 square mile garbage patch in the ocean between California and Hawaii.
In a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on Monday, a group of researchers revealed that several species of coastal invertebrate organisms survive and reproduce on plastic waste floating in the sea in many years.
Scientists say the findings suggest that plastic pollution in the oceans may be able to create new floating ecosystems of species that don’t normally survive in the open ocean.
Unlike organic material that decomposes and sinks within months or, at most, a few years, plastic debris can float in the ocean for much longer, giving creatures a chance to survive and reproduce in open ocean for years.
“It’s surprising to see how common these species are on the beach. They’re in 70% of the debris we found,” said Linsey Haram, a fellow scientist at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the lead author. in the study, told CNN.
Haram and his colleagues analyzed 105 items of plastic fished from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between November 2018 and January 2019. They identified 484 marine invertebrate organisms in the debris, accounting for 46 different -various species, of which 80% are usually found in coastal habitats. .
“A large percentage of the diversity we found were coastal species and not the native pelagic open ocean species that we were most expecting to find,” Haram said.
They still find many species in the open ocean, Haram added. “In two-thirds of the debris, we found two communities together… competing for space, but likely interacting in other ways.”
Haram said the consequences of introducing new species to remote areas of the ocean are not yet fully understood.
“There’s probably competition for space, because space is at a premium in the open ocean, there’s probably competition for food resources — but they can also eat each other. It’s hard to know what that’s exactly what happened, but we found evidence of some of the coastal anemones eating the open ocean species, so we know there’s some poaching going on between the two communities,” he said.
How the creatures reach the open ocean and how they survive there remains unclear. If, for example, they just ride on a piece of plastic that they attach to the beach, or if they are able to colonize new things once they are in the open ocean, it is not known.
Sea of plastic
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is twice the size of Texas, is the largest accumulation of marine plastic in the world.
The patch is surrounded by a large gyre — the largest of five large, rotating circular currents in the world’s oceans that pull debris toward the center and trap it there, creating garbage.
It’s a mistake to think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as an island of garbage, however, Matthias Egger, head of environmental and social affairs at The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit developing technologies to rid the oceans of plastic, told CNN.
“When you’re out there, all you see is pure blue sea,” said Egger, who helped with Haram’s research by collecting samples in the patch, fishing it with a net.
“You can think of it like the night sky. If you look up at night, you’ll see all the white dots, that’s what you see in the trash. It’s not dense, but there’s a lot of it… there, you start to see more plastic the longer you look,” he said.
The Ocean Cleanup initiative estimates that there are about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch weighing 80,000 tons. Most of the plastics found in the patch come from the fishing industry, while between 10% and 20% of the total amount can be traced back to the tsunami in Japan in 2011.
According to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the world produces about 460 million tons of plastic a year, a number that — without immediate action — will triple by 2060.
Worldwide, only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled, according to UNEP. About 22% of all plastic waste is mishandled and becomes litter, with large amounts eventually ending up in the oceans.
Scientists have warned that there has been a “rapid and unprecedented” increase in ocean plastic pollution since 2005.
“The problem is getting bigger and bigger by the minute,” Egger said. “We see turtles trapped in the fishing nets of ghosts. Sometimes it’s just turtles. We see pieces of plastic being dug up. Then there are also the pollutants — chemicals.”
Ocean Cleanup has built a massive garbage collection system, a U-shaped barrier with a net-like skirt that hangs underwater. It moves with the current and collects the faster moving plastics as they float.
“We want to see what the impact is on marine life. And once we know for sure that it’s safe and it benefits the environment, then we want to go up,” said Egger.
But cleaning is only part of the solution. A study published last month said that without urgent policy action, the rate of entry of plastics into the oceans could increase by almost 2.6 times between now and 2040.
The UN Environment Assembly passed a historic resolution last year to end plastic pollution and create the first global plastic pollution treaty by 2024 – a legally binding agreement that will address the entire cycle of life of plastic, from creation and design to its disposal.