(p. A3) Biologists who fished toothbrushes, rope and broken bottle shards from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch found them studded with gooseneck barnacles and jet-black sea anemones glistening like buttons. All told, they found 484 marine invertebrates from 46 species clinging to the detritus, they reported Monday [April 17, 2023] in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
. . .
Marine ecologists said they would expect most coastal species to struggle to survive outside their shoreline habitats. On the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, animals were found growing and reproducing.
“They’re having a blast,” said study author Matthias Egger, head of environmental and social affairs at the Dutch nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup. “That’s really a shift in the scientific understanding.”
Anemones like to protect themselves with grains of sand, Dr. Egger said, but out in the garbage patch they are covered in seed-like microplastics. Squeeze an anemone and the shards spew out, he said: “They’re all fully loaded with plastic on the outside and inside.”
. . .
The patch is also a haven for animals that are at home on the open ocean. Such species—sea snails, blue button jellyfish, and a relative called by-the-wind sailors—gather more densely where there is more plastic, Dr. Helm and her team said in a study posted online ahead of peer-review.
Removing the plastic would mean uprooting them, Dr. Helm said: “Cleaning it up is not actually that simple.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 17, 2023, and has the title “Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Is Bursting With Life.” The 7th, 8th, and 9th sentences quoted above, appear in the online, but not in the print, version of the commentary. Also, the online version of the sentence on being able to handle switching, contains seven added words of detail.)
The published version of the “posted online” article mentioned above is:
Haram, Linsey E., James T. Carlton, Luca Centurioni, Henry Choong, Brendan Cornwell, Mary Crowley, Matthias Egger, Jan Hafner, Verena Hormann, Laurent Lebreton, Nikolai Maximenko, Megan McCuller, Cathryn Murray, Jenny Par, Andrey Shcherbina, Cynthia Wright, and Gregory M. Ruiz. “Extent and Reproduction of Coastal Species on Plastic Debris in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 7, no. 5 (April 17, 2023): 687-97.