This is a guest post by Chelsea Rochman. Chelsea is a post-doc at the University of California Davis. This is her fourth 

WARNING: Some content may not be acceptable for a younger audience. (Note from Miriam: It’s ok, Chelsea, nothing in this post is at all out of the ordinary for DSN. It’s salty in these here parts.)

Strange title you say? What can sex possibly have to do with the combination of fish and plastic debris? NO, this is not related to the recent news article regarding a strange object found in the stomach of a fish! Instead, it arises from a recent study performed in our laboratory whereby we were equally perplexed to find something very fishy (no pun intended!) in the testes of a male fish exposed to plastic marine debris.

Sex

Since the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, we have heard eerie stories about alligators with abnormal penises from exposure to DDT, amphibians with eggs in their testes from exposure to atrazine and snails turning hermaphroditic from exposure to tributyltin —all considered hard evidence for endocrine disruption.

Well, this all sounds frightening, depressing and/or a bit like a dark comedy sketch, BUT what is endocrine disruption really?? Well, put simply it is literally any disruption to the endocrine system. The endocrine system is the system in the body of an organism that controls our hormones. As such, it’s critical for functions we all know well including stress before a deadline, the infamous running high, the dreaded PMS, sexual pleasures and arguably most importantly, reproduction (critical to maintaining a population).

What does this have to do with fish??

Well, fish are often used in scientific research assessing the endocrine disrupting hazards of chemicals on wildlife. Fish are a) important for human consumption, b) arguably great ecological indicators of the health of aquatic habitats, c) sensitive to endocrine disruption and d) live in regions that ultimately receive our waste (ever read the phrase, “all drains lead to the ocean”). As such, fish are exposed to many of the chemicals produced and consumed by us and we must understand the hazards of the cocktail of contaminants entering our water bodies. This keeps researchers very busy, as the number of new chemicals synthesized and marketed has increased exponentially over the past fifty years.

OK… and plastic debris?

In the past, endocrine-disruption was not addressed when assessing the hazards associated with synthetic chemicals, and as a consequence chemicals once considered benign have become ubiquitous as environmental contaminants and threaten biodiversity. Similarly, hazards associated with plastic in marine habitats were also likely not addressed when assessing hazards associated with plastic products. Today, plastic debris is ubiquitous in the marine environment and is a contaminant of concern recognized by several countries and international organizations.

As I’ve mentioned before, plastic debris should be considered as a multiple stressor in aquatic habitats as a consequence of the physical toxicity and large mixture of chemical contaminants (i.e. ingredients and environmental contaminants that accumulate on plastic debris) associated with it. Several of these plastic-associated chemicals have been linked to endocrine disrupting effects. Bisphenol-A, now banned on baby products in several states including California and in Europe, can disrupt endocrine-system function. Furthermore, there is evidence that phthalates and nonylphenol, additives to several plastic types, are estrogenic. As such, plastic marine debris is likely associated with a mixture of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. As such, it is critical to assess if the plastic debris that thousands of animals associate with food could initiate any of these eerie hormonal effects described.

The story

Somebody has to do the dirty work, so we dove in and asked if fish experience endocrine disrupting effects when they eat our plastic waste for dinner. Some of you may remember this experiment from a previous blog post. What we did not share then, and will share here, are some troubling results sparked by hypotheses spun from one strange discovery: the very abnormal testes of a male fish fed marine plastic debris.

The image above shows the testes of a normal fish fed a control diet (left) next to the testes of a fish exposed to plastic marine debris (right). The testes of this adult male fish exposed to plastic marine debris has rather abnormal germ cell proliferation. We are unsure whether these abnormal germ cells will lead to intersex or reproductive impairment, but the abnormality of these gonads and the similarity to female germ cells is cause for concern.

Our results show early-warning signs of endocrine disruption in fish exposed to a mixture of plastic and sorbed contaminants, suggesting that plastic marine debris, reportedly ingested by multiple wildlife species, may alter the functioning of the endocrine system in aquatic animals.

Most importantly, we report evidence at the molecular and organ level, for disruption to the endocrine system caused by the “cocktail” of contaminants associated with polyethylene deployed in an urban bay. Of major concern should be the permanent effects that exposure can have during critical early- life stages of organism development, which may impair reproductive success and harm wildlife populations. Still, chronic exposure to environmentally-relevant levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals can have an effect after maturity as reported here. Chronic exposure is typical of marine plastic debris as it accumulates in habitats and is a persistent material that can last for decades.

Current waste-management strategies for plastics remain ineffective, and in parallel global production of plastics continue to increase at an average rate of about 9% per year. Thus the current rate of infiltration of this material into aquatic habitats is likely to increase. Because there have been several reported incidents in wildlife of population declines resulting from the release of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, our results suggest the need for future studies to test hypotheses regarding endocrine disruption in wildlife as a result of exposure to the growing accumulation of plastic debris.

The published study is found here: Rochman et al., 2014, Science of the Total Environment.

The post A story about fish, plastic debris and sex first appeared on Deep Sea News.

That’s why I’ve been such a fan of Dr. Richard Kirby’s plankton photography for many years. His stunning plankton photos relay that feeling of excitement and discovery, the combination of “OMGWTFBBQ” and “woooooow.”

So I am so pleased that Dr. Kirby’s book Ocean Drifters (which came out in 2011, and is awesome) is now also on iTunes. To go along with his snazzy new release, he has a video of his plankton photos narrated by none other than Sir David Attenborough.

Ocean Drifters from Plymouth University on Vimeo.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Dr. Kirby’s Christmas card…made of plankton. Oh yes. It’s especially hilarious if you know what some of the creatures are, like the “sea angel” pteropods. There’s a key here.

You can see more of Dr. Kirby’s photos at this Daily Mail article  or by following him on Twitter.

The post The Plankton Pundit first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This was one of this amazing internet times where there is a total disconnect between people who know about zooplankton and everyone else. Everyone else was having a “My God, it’s full of stars” moment.

Meanwhile, I was bemused. Because this is a pretty standard, even marginally boring, zooplankton sample. I have seen literally thousands of samples (and I am using literally correctly here) that look just like this. There is nothing unusual whatsoever about this picture…except for that it’s based on a misconception.

This is NOT a “drop” of seawater. The ocean is not a thick zooplankton soup, except for in some rare and special circumstances. This is the result of towing a zooplankton net around to concentrate seawater enough to actually look at the zooplankton. Basically, this photo is a swimming-pool amount of ocean concentrated down into about a half-pint of goo.

This is a zooplankton net towing along (a bongo net, which has two nets, specifically). The cod ends are the solid white bits on the right side. That’s where the zooplankton end up.

This is a cod end filled with gooey plankton goodness, ready to be emptied into a bin and preserved:

This is a pint jar of concentrated zooplankton (the center of my life for about 4 years):

When you put all that beige goop under the microscope, you get the “single drop” in the viral photo above. My God, it’s filled with critters! But it’s the critters from a pretty big swathe of ocean, artificially brought together.

So, here’s my question, Did people think this was cool because zooplankton are awesome? I hope so! Because zooplankton ARE awesome! And that makes me happy!

Or did people think this was cool because they mistakenly thought that every drop of ocean was stuffed with zooplankton and were kinda freaked out that chaetognaths (the long wormy things) were going to eat their eyeballs? Because that does not make me happy. Chaetognaths are often around 1/2″-1″  long and wouldn’t fit in a drop of seawater (or in your eyeball) anyway.

Regardless, zooplankton going viral made me realize how much scientists can take for granted – knowing that the ocean is full of hard-to-see and beautiful animals, for example. We need to remember to share that more often.

UPDATE: A commenter on Boing Boing pointed me to this background on the original photo. In short, it was taken off Hawaii in 2006 by David Liittschwager, and was actually collected with a dip net, not a towed net. Here’s a photo of a dip net, though Liittschwager collected at night when far more animals are at the surface.  

Also, click through for ID of the plankton in the photo by Scripps professor Mark Ohman, who also happens to have been my Ph.D. advisor. (Zooplankton <3 4-evah!)

The post The sea is full of life, but not quite that full 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.

The post The scariest inhabitant of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not what you think first appeared on Deep Sea News.

You may have heard me say it once, and I’ll say it again: the oceans are a toilet bowl for our waste. Throughout history, our solution to pollution has oftentimes been “dilution”. As a consequence, chemical pollution is now ubiquitous in our oceans as a result of industrialization, waste-management strategies (and/or lack thereof), natural disasters, etc….

Picture a watershed. Treated or not, our waste often finds its way into the oceans via rivers and streams, like arteries leading to the sea. As a consequence, ocean water, sediments and marine life are contaminated with pollutants (e.g., plastic debris, pesticides such as DDT, flame retardants such as PBDEs and metals such as lead and copper). Due to a large diversity of sources, all leading to our connected oceans, it can be VERY difficult to pinpoint the source of pollution when its fate is the aquatic environment.

As such, it becomes my job to try and solve this mystery and basically play detective on the open sea.  What puzzle am I trying to unravel? Well, I’ll warn you, it’s a trashy one…

Throughout my scientific career, I have been trying to understand whether marine plastic debris is a vector for chemical pollutants to accumulate in marine animals and marine food webs. Over the years I have collected several lines of evidence suggesting that it may be.

Scientific Evidence #1: Plastic is made of a large diversity of chemical ingredients, several of which can be hazardous at large concentrations (e.g., the monomers vinyl chloride and styrenes and the flame retardant PBDEs).

Scientific Evidence #2: When plastic becomes marine debris it accumulates persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic substances (e.g., the banned pesticide DDT and industrial chemical PCBs) and toxic metals (e.g., lead and cadmium).

Thus, plastic marine debris is associated with a cocktail of chemicals that can be hazardous. So, the next question is, can these chemicals accumulate in animals upon exposure?

Scientific Evidence #3: When plastic, that is allowed to soak in the ocean, is fed to fish in the laboratory, some chemicals transfer from the plastic to the fish tissue, thus bioaccumulating. We found greater concentrations of PBDEs in fish fed plastic that had been in the ocean versus fish fed no plastic at all or virgin plastic.

Scientific Evidence from other studies: Plastic ingestion occurs in hundreds of species, including 30 species of marine mammals, 41 species of fish, 119 species of seabirds and 6 out of the 7 species of sea turtles and plastic debris recovered from the oceans globally, even from remote regions, is contaminated with chemical pollutants.

ALL leading to the question: Does what we have observed in the lab occur in nature, i.e., does the plastic ingestion observed in wildlife cause the bioaccumulation of chemical pollutants found associated with marine plastic debris? As mentioned earlier, this is where it gets tricky and one must think like a detective, pulling together pieces of a puzzle to ask a greater question.

I was granted an opportunity to sail across the South Atlantic, leaving from Brazil, with 5Gyres aboard their sailboat, the Seadragon. Despite the fact that I get horribly seasick, I jumped at the opportunity and raised enough funds (from the public!) to spend 4 weeks at sea in some of the worst weather I’ve ever experienced in my life with 12 strangers cramped into a small, small space. After fixing our main sail twice, repairing our water maker several times, and almost running out of fuel we made it to Cape Town, South Africa safe and sound. The experience was a mixture of horrible and awesome all at the same time! Would I do it again? Probably.

While at sea, we sampled lanternfish, plastic debris and water. 

We chose lanternfish because they are known to eat plastic debris in open ocean gyres and these fish are good indicators of contamination in the local environment. They make vertical migrations to the surface to feed, which is where plastic debris accumulates and eat low on the foodchain, mostly zooplankton. As such, one might expect that chemical body burdens in these fish would be similar to patterns in the water column where they were sampled. But, if they were exposed to plastic debris and were ingesting this material, we might expect their chemical body burden to be similar to the plastic debris.

Our objective was to determine if fish living in areas with large accumulations of plastic had larger accumulations of plastic-related chemicals. Thus, we analyzed all samples for a mixture of contaminants that are known to be associated with plastic either as an ingredient and/or that accumulate from the water column (BPA, alkylphenols, PBDEs and PCBs). Each analysis revealed the contamination pattern in each sample. These patterns each provide a piece of the puzzle that could be put together to understand if we could detect the presence of chemicals from plastic in wild-caught fish.

Because this study was conducted in the open ocean, we observed a lot of variability. There was plastic and chemicals contamination in every sample, and concentrations and amounts were variable along our cruise track. Still, one pattern stood out above all else…

The flame-retardants PBDEs are added to plastic products to, as you might have guessed, keep them from going up in flames. These compounds are composed of 2 aromatic rings with differing numbers of bromines. The higher brominated compounds are often used in plastics today and can be found on some plastic products in large concentrations. We found that most of the plastic debris we sampled had a large amount of these higher brominated congeners relative to the lower brominated PBDEs. In water samples, we found an opposite pattern, that 100% of the PBDEs in water samples were these lower brominated congeners. As such, most of the fish we sampled had congener patterns similar to those in the water column. However, some fish had relatively large amounts of higher brominated PBDEs in their tissues and these fish happened to be caught in areas with relatively larger amounts of plastic debris. We found that the amount of higher brominated PBDEs in fish tissue was positively correlated with the amount of plastic sampled in the area. So, our data suggests that YES, chemicals from plastic can accumulate in fish and that higher brominated flame-retardants may be indicative of plastic ingestion in wildlife.

Adding strength to our evidence, others researchers in Japan and at CalEPA have come to the same conclusions finding similar patterns with higher brominated PBDEs and plastic debris in wild-caught fish and seabirds in the North Pacific.

So while it can be difficult to determine the sources of contaminants in nature, good detective work can lead to a greater weight of evidence to better understand sources of chemical pollutants, even in the vast open ocean. And in this case, it seems that the current state of the evidence suggests that marine plastic debris can be a vector for chemical pollutants to accumulate in marine animals and thus potentially marine food webs. So now I’m on to the next piece of the puzzle: how might this affect humans, who sit at the top of some marine foodchains, when our diet includes seafood?

The post Guest post: Playing Detective in the Great Blue Sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The long and windy path to a Ph.D. is lined with blood, sweat and tears. Like a roller coaster, it can be filled with joy, anxiety, fear and even nausea. This story is regarding one chapter of my dissertation, one that filled me with all these emotions and lead me to the conclusion that even in science, sh%* happens. But in this story, what we could not control lead us to better scientific conclusions with greater environmental realism. Due to what may seem like an experimental shortcoming, we were able to answer an important “so what?” question related to plastic marine debris.

Today, it’s nearly impossible to avoid the many images of marine mammals, birds and turtles entangled in plastic debris or washed up with large plastic items in their digestive tract. What we don’t see, but may question, is how the chemical pollutants associated with plastic debris interact with marine life and potentially our seafood.

When plastic becomes marine debris it accumulates several chemical pollutants swirling in seawater such as pesticides (e.g. DDT), industrial chemicals (e.g. PCBs) and metals (e.g. lead) adding to the several potentially hazardous ingredients (e.g. PBDEs and bisphenol A) already in the plastic material. Thus plastic debris presents a “cocktail” of chemical contaminants to marine animals when mistaken as a meal.

As such, it has been hypothesized that plastic debris acts as a transporter of these chemicals, several of which can be toxic at certain doses, to animals upon ingestion. While we have strong evidence that hundreds of species eat plastic debris, and several case studies showing that plastic ingestion can physically harm an animal, we have little evidence of the fate of chemicals associated with plastic debris when ingested by marine life.

In our laboratory, the Aquatic Health Program at UC Davis, we designed an experiment to determine if plastic ingestion is indeed a mechanism for persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to accumulate in marine life. Because we wanted to understand how marine plastic debris might interact with both ecology and human health, we chose to conduct our study using fish, suggested as a good indicator of ecosystem health and a common seafood item.

To do this, we devised a rigorous controlled experiment, using clean laboratory-reared Japanese medaka and a contaminant-free diet made in the laboratory. This way we could be sure any contamination in our fish was a product of plastic ingestion. We also bound the plastic to the diet in our two plastic treatments so we could be sure these fish were eating the plastic. OR SO WE THOUGHT…

Similar to nature, and even with our best efforts, sometimes controlled laboratory experiments are not as controlled as planned… Instead, all 3 diets (negative control, virgin polyethylene and polyethylene marine debris) turned out to be contaminated with POPs (as cod liver oil is an ingredient in our formulated diet). Moreover, the plastic particles completely dispersed from the diet when sprinkled into the fish tanks at each feeding.

Immediately, we began to panic. We feared our fish would not eat the plastic at all and if they did that it would be impossible to decipher contamination from plastic versus contamination from their diet. After several days of freaking out, worrying all our work had gone to waste, what seemed to be a catastrophe became a blessing in disguise. HALLELUJAH!!

DUMB LUCK #1: The oceans are a toilet bowl for chemical contaminants, including POPs. As such, these chemicals are ubiquitous in marine foodwebs in the absence of plastic debris. While it is well-known that these chemicals contaminate plastic debris, and there is some evidence that these chemicals transfer to animals (e.g. lugworms) upon ingestion, it is not clear if the source of POPs from plastic to marine animals matters in an already contaminated system. What I mean is: in the presence of plastic debris, is an organism at risk of accumulating a higher dose of POPs? As a consequence of the contamination in the cod liver oil, we were able to examine this question because our experiment included contamination in the foodchain (i.e. the diet) of all treatments with the addition of more POPs on the polytethylene in the marine-plastic treatment.

DUMB LUCK #2: The plastic did not bind to the diet and instead, upon feeding the fish, the plastic dispersed and floated independently in the water as it does in the real world. Fish were not force-fed plastic, but instead were exposed to it and had to “choose” to eat it. In this way, we were able to consider the dose of plastic to the fish in amount of plastic per volume of water. As such, the exposure concentration of plastic floating in our tanks was less than some of the largest concentrations found in the “garbage patches” of the subtropical gyres, and thus environmentally relevant. And to our surprise, the fish ate plastic and continued to do so for the entire 2 months!!

Thus, with a lot of hard work and good attitudes regarding laboratory mishaps, our experiment became ecologically relevant. Initially, we were only able to ask the mechanistic question: “do contaminants on plastic transfer to fish upon ingestion?”. Instead, we could address the more relevant question, “is plastic, at real-world concentrations, an important vector of contaminants to the foodweb, despite widespread and global contamination of these chemicals in seawater, sediment and the marine food chain?”.

After a 2-month exposure to plastic, the concentrations of POPs in the fish demonstrated that despite contamination in the diet, concentrations of POPs were greater in fish fed plastic with sorbed chemical pollutants. For some chemicals, this significantly greater concentration in fish suggests that plastic debris can be an important vector of POPs into marine life and thus potentially into the seafood we put on our own plates.

For more information, check out the published study, and feel free to ask questions in the comment section.

The post Guest post: The invisible consequences of mistaking plastic for dinner first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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.

This isn’t the story I usually tell. I usually say that I always liked to write, and that I was inspired by the communications education at the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity & Conservation, and that I had been reading other blogs like Deep Sea News and Blogfish and Malaria etc. and Pharyngula, and wanted to join the conversation. All this is true.

But really, I started blogging as I sat for long hours as my mother slowly – too slowly – faded away from cancer. It was non-smoking-related lung cancer that had spread to her brain, and she hadn’t been aware for weeks.  There was no conversation to make. I had dropped all my second-year graduate school classes so there was no work to do. There was just a quiet house, and a computer, and the promise that there were other things in the world beside this.

Part of my writing was motivated by that promise. The other part was motivated by the people. Online, I found people who cared about the same issues I did, who balanced science and communication, who were hilarious and irreverent, and who also believed that one of the keys to saving the ocean was just trying to pay more attention. Meeting in person was almost always a delight, and causing a bit of trouble together (#DSNsuite, anyone?) even more of a delight.

Now, over five years later, blogging and other social media (mostly Twitter), have taken me farther than I ever thought possible. Blogging about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch motivated my doctoral dissertation. The social media skills I developed through independent blogging helped to make the SEAPLEX cruise more successful than I ever thought possible. Blogging about iron fertilization, and seafood, and privilege, gave me the ability to help shape a larger conversation about what the world should be. And blogging was one of the major reasons that I was selected for my current job, which is the reason that I’m writing this post.

I love science. I love spending time with my creature friends (even I did kill them to begin with) – delicate bubble snails and flower-like jellyfish and graceful little copepods. I love figuring out what they are, and asking questions about what’s going on with them, and poking around in the ocean and in the lab until some answers (and more questions) pop up. But there is only so far science can take us. Science can inform, but cannot decide, the hard choices that we as a species must now make.

Starting this February, I’m entering the policy arena as a Knauss Marine Policy Fellow. For the next year, I’ll have the honor of working at the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources, Democratic staff, particularly with the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans, and Insular Affairs. Part of the reason I’m able to do this is that I was able to show rather convincingly that I had plenty of experience translating technical information for a general audience. In fact, the interview went something like this:

“We see that you are a qualified scientist, but can you write?”
“Yes.”
“You seem very confident.”
“Google me.”
“Ok, you can write.”

I’m beyond thrilled to have the opportunity to spend a year at the center of United States environmental policy. But to grow, you have to give something up, and independent participation in social media – especially on issues relevant to the Committee – is not compatible with politics. So, starting on February 4th, just after the Science Online conference, I’ll be taking at least a year-long leave of absence from all public social media.

I don’t know what will happen after that year, since I don’t know what will become of me. Perhaps I’ll re-emerge in a research post-doc position, free to participate online as I please, and with lots of stories to tell. Perhaps I’ll fall in love with Capitol Hill, stay in policy, and continue to avoid a public online presence. Perhaps there’s another path that I don’t know about yet. Regardless, please know that it is all of you – friends and commenters and lurkers – that have made the last five years a formative experience in my life, and a tremendous source of pleasure.

My activities and contact information will continue to be updated on my professional website, and you can follow the Natural Resources Committee Democrats on various social media.

Fair winds and following seas.

The post To take arms against a sea of troubles: my life in blogging, and farewell first appeared on Deep Sea News.

A shoal of Deeplings will be attending this week’s Science Online conference in North Carolina. If you’ll be there, come say hi to Craig, Al, Kim, Holly, and me. (Sadly, Rick and Kevin can’t make it.) We’ll be joined by many equally lusty ocean compadres. Come say hi! You can find us at our sessions (see below) or by following the sounds of clinking glasses and/or shanty singing.

If you won’t be at the conference, you can still participate! You can join a watch party if there’s one in your locale, follow the conference on Twitter at #scio13, and follow our shenanigans at #DSNsuite.

Sessions that the Deeplings are moderating:

Session 1B & 2A : Why should scientists ‘do’ outreach? – Miriam Goldstein, Matt Shipman & Karen James

Session 1D: Impressions matter: Embracing art & design in research and science communication – Holly Bik and Liz Neeley

Session 8B: What happens when people start taking your online ramblings seriously – Miriam Goldstein and Holly Bik

The post The Deeplings at Science Online first appeared on Deep Sea News.