When Waste Becomes Home
The astounding quantities of discarded plastic that end up in oceans each year tend to concentrate in ring-like swirls of currents called gyres, yet most of it can be hard to spot—not because it’s not there in great quantities, but because it often takes the form of fingernail-sized microplastics. “It looks like pristine ocean until you tow your net through the water,” researcher Erik Zettler at Sea Education Association (SEA) said about the North Atlantic Gyre. “That’s when you find the plastic.”
The presence of so much plastic debris at sea poses dire threats to the marine life unlucky enough to ingest small bits of it or to become entangled in nets or plastic bags. But recent research has also revealed some of the surprising ways a few resourceful marine creatures use it to their
