Your Face Scrub Could Be Starving Coral Reefs
The ocean’s corals have a lot to deal with these days.
Ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions are warming ocean temperatures, bleaching and sometimes killing coral reefs that shelter fish that end up on your dinner plate. The seas are absorbing carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, which is acidifying the oceans and retarding the growth of coral.
Now Australian researchers have found that the 8 million tons of plastic we dump into the ocean each year are being eaten by corals, which gums up their digestive tracks and can lead to starvation.
By nature, corals are non-picky eaters, said study coauthor Mia Hoogenboom of ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, and the 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the water today look just as enticing to the organisms as their favorite meal, zooplankton.
Researchers took corals from the Great Barrier Reef and put them in water littered with microplastics—five millimeter or smaller bits that make up most of the ocean’s total plastic pollution. They found that the coral polyps ate almost as much plastic as the marine plankton they were supposed to be eating, and the tiny plastic pieces ended up lodged deep in their gut cavity tissue.
Coral gets energy in part from photosynthesis, but the symbiotic creature needs that gut tissue to digest food. If it’s jammed up with plastics, it could slowly starve to death. Scientists studied the water around the Great Barrier Reef and found bits of plastic there too—just in smaller numbers.
“If microplastic pollution increases on the Great Barrier Reef, corals could be negatively affected as their tiny stomach cavities become full of indigestible plastic,” Hoogenboom said.
Coral is just the latest organism found to be dealing with plastic pollution.
Hundreds of marine species are trying to cope with ever-increasing encounters with plastics they come across in the sea. In a recent study, researchers found that plastics were the culprits in 92 percent of marine animals’ reported encounters with debris. Those encounters usually involved animals either eating plastic bits or getting tangled in plastic rope or netting, and resulted in injury or death about 80 percent of the time.
Still, the effects of microplastics have been understudied, and there is a need “for further investigation of whether and how microplastic contamination influences the physiology, growth and survival of marine organisms,” the authors wrote.
Original article from TakePart