Why are they using RO-BOOM oil booms?

Andrew Thaler over at Southern Fried Science pointed this out. RO-BOOMS are commercially available oil containment spill booms that have been around at least since 1988. I would assume that something is known about their durability?

Yup, definitely a RO-BOOM.

Excuse my language, BUT WHY THE F** ARE THEY BLACK?

You just spent all this money to add a custom paint job to a floating advertisement potential maritime hazard and it’s one of the least visible colors at sea. I CAN’T EVEN.

Where are the booms?

There’s gotta be a notice to mariner’s out there somewhere. In case you don’t know what this is, it’s a public announcement that you have to put out when ever you deploy anything at sea. So people don’t run over it or anything cause it’s camouflaged.

Are these the booms the 1 km deployment planned for Japan will use?

ARE THEY? I NEEDS TO KNOW. They look a lot different from the booms that were tested at the Marin Facility. 

which also seems to be different than what was tested at the Deltares facility.

Do the maybe intended booms actually collect plastic?

No seriously, there seems to have been a lot of effort to test the structural stability, but no testing whether they actually collect plastic and debris. I would have liked to see them drag the barrier around a bit just to see before deploying a big and expensive mooring if it is indeed the one they are going to use. As the Feasibility study indicated, sometimes the barriers can’t collect plastic so it would be useful to know when this is.

How did they get funding EUR 0.5 Million from the Dutch Government?

Is there a public proposal? It would be great to see, especially since this is now a publicly funded project and it would be great resource for reporters interested in the project (instead of them asking Miriam and I to constantly peer review it…grumble grumble).

That’s all I got for now. Any more questions you can ask Andrew Thaler at Southern Fried Science who also has questions.

The post The Ocean Cleanup deployed a prototype and I honestly have A LOT of questions first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Nope. The scariest inhabitant of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is this.

Meet Halofolliculina. It is a single-celled organism – a ciliate – about the size of a sesame seed with teeny tiny devil horns. (They are actually pericytostomial wings, not devil horns, but I won’t tell if you don’t.) My collaborators Hank Carson and Marcus Eriksen found these little buggers living on plastic debris floating way offshore in the western Pacific, which wouldn’t be terrifying in itself since a lot of strange critters live on plastic debris (see our paper for a complete list). But Halofolliculina is a pathogen that causes skeletal eroding band disease in corals, and this piece of debris was headed towards Hawaii.

Unfortunately, Hank and Marcus didn’t save the corals of Hawaii by capturing these Halofolliculina. Skeletal eroding band disease was discovered in Hawaiian corals back in 2010. While It’s not know how this disease got to Hawaii, a lot of plastic trash washes up on Hawaii, and it’s possible that some of that trash had Halofolliculina living on it.

Along with Halofolliculina, there are all kinds of creatures living on plastic debris that wouldn’t normally be able to survive floating in the middle of the ocean. Along with the usual members of the North Pacific rafting community – gooseneck barnacles, bryozoans, rafting crabs – we found brittle stars, sea spiders, and even a shipworm that was probably really unsatisfied living on plastic. Essentially, the trash acts like tiny little islands, with small pieces hosting only a few species, and large pieces (like tangled fishing nets) hosting many more.

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When I went out to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre in 2009 and 2010, part of the goal was to figure out how much plastic debris was actually there. That’s the first step to understanding what impact it might be having the ecosystem, after all. So we towed a net around on the surface, and towed a net underwater, and made visual counts of the plastic floating by on the ocean’s surface. Between the two cruises, we had measurements of plastic quantity over 6,000 miles of ocean – we were all set, right?

But when we started to analyze the data, things got complicated. The quantity of trash was hugely variable. Tows taken right next to each other, or taken in around the same location a year apart, had very different quantities of plastic. In order to get a handle on why this was, I teamed up with Andrew Titmus, an ornithologist who did the visual counts of floating plastic on our 2009 cruise, and Mike Ford, a NOAA oceanographer who was Chief Scientist on the 2010 cruise. The results were published in PLOS ONE last week, and NOAA has a brief writeup here.

The paper was hard to write, because it’s essentially “here’s a bunch of things that you should know about where plastic is in the quote-unquote garbage patch,” or, as I very scientifically referred to it on Twitter, a giant BLORT of data. I’m going to highlight a couple major points, but feel free to check out the paper yourself and ask more questions below.

1. Wind matters. 

When the ocean is really calm, the plastic bobs to the surface and there’s a lot of it. When the wind kicks up and the ocean gets choppy, the plastic gets mixed below the surface, and you can’t capture it in a surface-towed net (which is the standard way to measure plastic). Our plastic counts go way down once the wind gets to a certain point, regardless of where we are in the ocean. Giora Proskurowski & colleagues found a similar phenomenom in the Atlantic.

2. Filtering tiny amounts of plastic out of the ocean takes out a lot of life, too. 

For every 1000 grams (2 lbs) of plastic bits we removed from the water, we took out 731 grams (1.6 lbs) of ocean life, primarily zooplankton and baby fish. That’s a lot of critters, particularly since life is relatively sparse in the North Pacific Gyre. Remediation schemes will have to be sure that they are not causing more damage than they’re solving. For more on that, check out the Open Ocean Cleanup Guidelines.

3. Since plastic varies so much, it’s going to take a lot of work to figure out whether it’s increasing or decreasing. 

We used our data to create an imaginary future where plastic had increased between 10% and 100%. It turns out that it’s really hard to detect even relatively large increases in plastic with reasonable certainty. On the 2009 cruise, we worked our butts off for three weeks to take 119 surface samples (and it took me over a year, a lot of bad R code, and the help of awesome volunteers to convert jars of plankton and plastic into data). Unfortunately, it would take 250 surface samples to detect a 50% increase in microplastic with 80% probability. We’re going to have to figure out a better way to do that, or we won’t be able to tell if the problem is getting better, or getting worse.

So, what’s the take-home of this paper? We can’t go waltzing into the Gyre wanting to do everything at once (like I did in 2009 *cough cough*). To be effective, expeditions on the science of plastic debris need to think about what their specific objectives are. Want to study the animals growing right on the plastic? Target the rarer large floating objects. Want to get a glimpse of how the widest array of ocean life is interacting with plastic? Seek out trash stuck in eddies, where temporary pulses of high-nutrient water cause plankton to grow and attract fish.

If you want more, data from this paper is archived online at the CCE LTER Datazoo, and figures that didn’t quite fit into the paper, such as the types of plastic we collected, can be found over on Figshare. Want to know more about what all this plastic is doing to marine life? Check out Chelsea’s guest post and new paper on what happens when fish eat plastic, and Mark Browne’s new paper (with BBC article!) on lugworms. And as always, I’m happy to answer your questions in the comment thread.

The post How do you figure out how much plastic is in the ocean? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On my 2009 expedition to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, otherwise known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” I collected a bunch of barnacles, along with samples of a lot of other organisms that were growing on the debris, because I was interested in seeing what species were there. Gooseneck barnacles look kind of freaky. Like acorn barnacles (the ones that more commonly grow on docks), they’re essentially a little shrimp living upside down in a shell and eating with their feet. Unlike acorn barnacles, gooseneck barnacles have a long, muscular stalk.

It took me a couple years to get around to processing those samples, but eventually I found myself in the lab dissecting barnacles in order to identify them. As I sat there, I thought “Well, I’m working on these barnacles anyway – wonder what they’re eating?” So I pulled out the intestine of the barnacle I was working on, cut it open, and a bright blue piece of plastic popped out. I reached into my jar o’ dead barnacles and dissected a few more, and found plastic in their guts as well.

Thinking about it logically, it makes a lot of sense that gooseneck barnacles are eating plastic. They are really hardy, able to live on nearly any floating surface from buoys to turtles, so they’re very common in the high-plastic areas of the gyre. They live right at the surface, where tiny pieces of buoyant plastic float. And they’re extremely non-picky eaters that will shove anything they can grab into their mouth.

But, since I didn’t really collect barnacles with this study in mind, I didn’t have enough samples to figure out how widespread this phenomena might be. Fortunately, I’d been lucky enough to collaborate with the wonderful Sea Education Association and one of their chief scientists, Deb Goodwin, for several years. SEA kindly took samples for us, and Deb, once a perfectly respectable remote sensing expert, got deep into some pretty smelly barnacle guts.

After dissecting 385 barnacles, Deb and I found that 33.5% – one-third – had plastic in their guts. Most barnacles had eaten just a few particles, but we found a few that were absolutely filled with plastic, to a maximum of 30 particles, which is a lot of plastic in an animal that is just a couple inches long.  We also analyzed the type of plastic in the barnacle guts, and found that it was approximately representative of plastic on the ocean surface – the barnacles are probably just grabbing whatever they come across and shoving it into their mouths.  Barnacles are perfectly capable of pooping out plastic – I observed plastic packaged up in fecal pellets, ready to be excreted the next time the barnacle had access to a couple minutes and a magazine – so it is very likely that more barnacles are eating plastic than we were able to measure.

So, this is disturbing. As I’ve discussed many times, there is a ton of plastic in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyres (but no island!) and it is being eaten by birds, turtles, and fish. And now we’ve documented plastic ingestion in a very common invertebrate – probably the numerous animal living attached to the plastic – as well. But just finding plastic in barnacle guts does not really tell us much about how plastic is impacting the oceanic ecosystem. This is because we don’t really understand how barnacles are interacting with the rest of the ocean.

Gooseneck barnacles aren’t necessarily incredibly central to the North Pacific Gyre ecosystem. The barnacles are voracious predators, but since plastic is so patchy, it’s not clear that they eat enough zooplankton to really affect the ecosystem – and a lot of the food I found in the barnacle guts were their own cyprid babies. (Barnacles are nasty cannibals, apparently.) They’re eaten by a few predators – a pretty little sea slug and some crabs – but fish don’t seem that interested in barnacles, maybe because those fish didn’t evolve with a ton of floating debris. If barnacles are an important prey item, it is possible that their ingestion of plastic particles could transfer plastic or pollutants through the food web, but it is far from clear this is the case.

However, the most dire effects could be the most subtle. The subtropical gyres are 40% of the entire earth’s surface, and so they are very important to controlling the way that nutrients and carbon move around in the ocean. The microbes and animals that live on plastic debris are not the same as the microbes and animals that float around in the ocean, and may not act in the same way. It’s such a cliché for a scientist to call for more research, but we just don’t understand enough about the way that the ocean works, and enough about the way that plastic affects the ocean, to really say what the effects of barnacles eating plastic might be.

Of course, none of this uncertainty changes the fact that plastic trash does not belong in the ocean, and we need to be a lot better about preventing it from getting in there in the first place. However, I am skeptical of plastic cleanup schemes, so please read these Open Ocean Cleanup Guidelines (which I co-authored) and Dr. Martini’s post before you suggest that we just clean it up. I think we are probably stuck with the plastic pollution that we have, so understanding what it is doing to the ocean is important.

I’ll be back in a couple weeks to do another behind-the-scenes post on a second debris-related paper! In the meantime, I’m happy to answer your questions about the barnacles.

The post Behind the scenes: plastic-eating barnacles in the North Pacific Gyre first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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You might have seen the headlines last week: Big rise in North Pacific plastic waste, Plastic in ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ increases 100-fold, Ocean Trash is a Lifesaver for Insects, and so forth. These were based on a paper that I wrote with two co-authors, which came out in Biology Letters last week. Because the paper has gotten so much media attention already – including my very first Ed Yong original! – I’m not going to blog about the paper directly. Instead, I’m going to give you a glimpse behind the scenes. Since scientists-vs-media is a perennially hot topic on science blogland, I’ll explain how we prepared for and managed the media in order to achieve coverage with which we were mostly quite happy.

Having worked on North Pacific oceanic marine debris for a number of years, I knew this was going to be a hot topic. We were taken aback by the intensity of the media and public interest in our 2009 cruise to study plastic in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and interest has remained steady over the past few years. So once the paper was in press, about 2-3 weeks before online publication,  I gave a copy of the paper to Scripps public information officer Mario Aguilera. I’ve worked with Mario for several years now – he even came to sea with us! (that’s him on the BBC website deploying the manta net with me) – and I knew he was very familiar with the work. Mario completed the press release about a week before the paper came out, which gave me, my co-authors, and my advisor plenty of time to review it. Preparing for press coverage carefully ahead of time also gave us time to ask Anthony Smith for permission to use his wonderful sea skater photo, which you can see on the Scripps website. The paper was embargoed until Wednesday, May 9th, but media had access to it for a week beforehand. I started getting calls and emails on the Monday before it was released, which built to quite a number of inquiries by Wednesday.

My personal media policy is this: my work was paid for by United States taxpayers, California taxpayers, and private donors, and so I’ll talk to anyone who asks me polite and coherent questions, if my schedule allows. This means that I’ve done 28 interviews since last Monday – and they’re still trickling in. All these interviews probably did cost me a couple days of work – but I spent 2.5 years and a lot of money on the science on this paper! A couple of days talking to the media to tell the public what they paid for is more than fair recompense.

Our preparations and Mario’s hard work in wrangling lots of scheduling made all 28 interviews run reasonably smoothly. Also, my long-time participation in science outreach was a plus – for example, I had used Twitter to ask BBC reporter Jonathan Amos to stop by my poster at the Ocean Sciences Meeting this past February, so he was already familiar with the research before even writing the story. Doing lots of science outreach also meant that I was practiced in explaining this work to a general audience, so I wasn’t doing it for the first time when talking to a journalist. One surprising barrier was my lack of a land line – I don’t have one in my office or home. (I use a Google Voice number for my “office phone.”) I suspect this type of setup is increasingly common among younger scientists (and people in general), so I encourage the journalists out there to get familiar with Skype as a workaround. I did a couple video interviews over Skype and it worked well, though it’s probably not for novice communicators, since talking alone in your office to your laptop camera is quite challenging.

While I was pretty pleased with accuracy of the media coverage as a whole, I did run into some problems that were largely my fault. I should have realized that I needed to more carefully explain the difference between size (“Size of Texas!” which is not accurate) and concentration (100-fold increase in the number & mass of plastic PER unit seawater, which is accurate). When talking about fish eating plastic (a separate study done by Scripps students last year), I should have been more careful to mention that these fish swim up to the surface every night, and therefore may be eating plastic there, not in the depths of the ocean. That’s the stereotypical scientist trip-up – Diel Vertical Migration is an ocean phenomenon engrained in my SOUL, but it is definitely not common knowledge. Problems from the media side of things primarily stemmed from careless readings of the press release – for example, we found that sea skater EGGS were increasing, but couldn’t show statistically that sea skater ADULTS were increasing, which some reporters misunderstood.

I’m extremely grateful to Biology Letters for making our paper open access. I chose to publish in Biology Letters in part because everything is open access a year after publication, but I didn’t have the funds to make the paper open access right away. (See that pretty color figure? That’s where my money went.) I’m thrilled that Biology Letters editors saw the public interest in this topic and decided to make the paper freely available to all. I’ve made the new data from the paper open access as well – anyone can download it and take an in-depth look at Pacific plastic pollution themselves. (Thanks to the NSF-funded California Current Long Term Ecological Research site for hosting it.)

And of course, it was all worth it – because we were featured in the Onion! (“Better than Science or Nature,” according to my Twitter friends…)

I hope that this is helpful to other scientists who may be facing similar media situations. Please feel free to ask questions or share your own experiences in the comments.

[cross-posted at the SEAPLEX blog]

The post Pacific plastic, sea skaters, and the media: behind the scenes of my recent paper first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Hi internet! I just spent the month of July sailing (yes! sailing!) from Honolulu to San Francisco aboard Sea Education Association’s vessel SSV Robert C. Seamans. (I went out with them last year as well). SEA’s main mission is education, and for students seeking an incredible, life-changing introduction to seafaring and ocean science I can’t recommend their programs highly enough. But you don’t have to take my word for it – check out the student blog.

This cruise, I was aboard as a visiting researcher, riding along so I could work my evil bidding on the zooplankton of North Pacific Subtropical Gyre and Subtropical Convergence Zone. I also helped sail the ship and run science operations as part of B Watch, and did my best to indoctrinate the students into the glories of the planktonic universe. We caught some top-notch critters – including something very special that I will blog about very soon. (Hint: Not a kraken.) Other excellent biology: a huge hyperiid amphipod swarm over a hundred miles across, the raptorial copepod Euchaeta (a giant copepod that shreds other copepods with giant spiked appendages) , delicious mahi-mahi and albacore tuna, and of course a pod of bowriding common dolphins. To tide you over, here’s a photo taken on this cruise of one of my very favorite copepods, Sappharina spp. So pretty! The males have iridescent displays to attract the ladies.

I also made a very important discovery. Non-denatured ethanol, which is used to preserve organisms for genetic work, often comes in huge 20-gallon drums. These particular drums were helpfully labeled – see the wording to the upper right of the large red Flammable Liquid diamond. Make sure not to drink scientific-grade non-denatured ethanol on Pesach, fellow Jews! Note: Even if alcohol were not strictly banned on board US research vessels, which it is, 95% ethanol is NOT for consumption! Besides, your plankton needs it more than you.

Other non-science perks of this particular voyage: reading Hamlet underneath a rainbow while anchored off O’ahu (See top photo. HOLY CRAP THIS IS MY JOB! Well, not the Hamlet part), truly amazing food including fresh homemade bagels, singing a lot of shanties, and of course wearing my Deep Sea News Hat while sitting on top of the foremast.

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