While scientists continue to debate how big the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or more correctly, the North Pacific subtropical gyre) actually is – see Plasteurope.com of 07.01.2011 – new research has turned up an additional threat emanating from the plastic flotsam and jetsam. In an article published in the journal “Biology Letters,” Miriam Goldstein, a researcher for Scripps Institute of Oceanography (San Diego, California/USA; www.sio.ucsd.edu), points to consequences for the eco system that have not been part of the debate up to now.

Goldstein says the “100-fold upsurge” in plastic garbage in the ocean over the past 40 years is altering the habitats of marine insects such as the “Halobates sericeus”, popularly known as sea skaters or water striders. The bugs are finding the microscopic chunks of plastics (less than 5mm in diameter) to be ideal breeding grounds, she adds. This has led to a rise in the insect’s population density in the gyre that could threaten animals across the marine food chain, such as crabs that eat the bugs and their eggs.

The new Scripps study follows one it conducted in 2011. In this, some 9% of the fish collected during the institute’s SEAPLEX exhibition of 2009 – see Plasteurope.com of 25.08.2009 – were found to have plastic waste in their stomachs. This led the scientists to calculate that fish in the immediate ocean depths of the Pacific gyre ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000-24,000 t/y.

A plastic garbage patch has also been located in the Atlantic Ocean, a few hundred miles off the coast of the southern US. In April, researchers at Brazil’s Instituto Oceanográfico (www.io.usp.br) found another species of sea skaters in plastic waste floating the southern Atlantic.