On plastic trash that has been floating in the Pacific for years, scientists have found thriving communities of coastal creatures that now live thousands of kilometers away from their original habitat.
Discoveries researchand magazines Nature Ecology & Evolution show that ocean plastic pollution can enable the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that otherwise cannot survive in the open sea.
The results of this research raised the question of how these creatures get to the open ocean and survive there.
Scientists say it is not known whether, for example, they ended up in this pile of garbage by attaching themselves to plastic on the shore that later ended up in the ocean, or if they managed to colonize new objects after finding themselves in the open ocean.
A large Pacific island of garbage floating in the ocean between California and Hawaii was discovered in 1997, and the waste it is made of covers 600.000 square kilometers, writes CNN.
Unlike organic material that decomposes within a few months to a few years, plastic can float in the oceans for much longer, which allows some species to reproduce in the open sea, reminds Radio Free Europe.
xabayMost of the larger plastic waste comes from the fishing industry, while between 10 and 20 percent of the total trash comes from the 2011 Japanese tsunami.
ZS/FoNet
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