Plastic is so pervasive that I sometimes forget it's all around me—in toothpaste, in makeup, in clothes. But plastic is also omnipresent in places untouched by people, and one sobering forecast shook me: By 2050, it's likely that plastic in the oceans will outweigh all the oceans' fish. Some reports predict 850-950 million tons of plastic (the equivalent in weight of 4.5 million blue whales). Given all the plastic we've put into the oceans over decades—the present rate is 4 to 12 million tons of plastic per year—you might think some species will have adapted somehow, perhaps taking a liking to the synthetic polymers.
Well, Swedish researchers recently found that European perch larvae devour the stuff. "Naïve larvae that come across these plastic particles believe that it's a resource that they need to ingest large amounts of, almost like teens only eating unhealthy fast foods," says Oona Lönnstedt, a marine biologist at Uppsala University. "This is of great concern as larvae don't get any energy to grow if they only ingest plastic."
The plastic will all be recycled when Waterworld arrives.
(Score: 1) by Oakenshield on Tuesday October 18 2016, @07:48PM
Nothing's free in Waterworld
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:37PM
Plastic is one of the oceans' four main food groups. The others being wood, metal, and the stuff they put inside Twinkies.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:41PM
> By 2050, it's likely that plastic in the oceans will outweigh all the oceans' fish.
So do the rocks, underwater volcanoes, plankton, algae ...
> 850-950 million tons of plastic (the equivalent in weight of 4.5 million blue whales)
I don't use the blue-whale system, can you convert that into pink-elephants-Fridays or acre-inch-SiWafers? That would make it easier to calculate the dilution in mind-bobblingly-huge-numbers of cubic angstroms of water.
Can get back to talking about the actual problem, in terms of time-to-recovery-after-all-humans-die, or probability of my grandchildren's Tuna sushi being toxic?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:53PM
Do fish eat rocks and volcanoes? If they do, is it harmful to them?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:14AM
Ingesting volcanoes may lead to Boerhaave's syndrome [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday October 19 2016, @05:14AM
I see someone takes the pending list seriously.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday October 18 2016, @08:49PM
Sounds similar to the period in Earth's history between when trees started to grow and when bacteria evolved to eat the trees. The Carboniferous period of Earth's history ended ~290 million years ago with the explosive growth of microbes capable of metabolizing lignin. [nationalgeographic.com]
Fortunately, it may not take 60 million years for this new food source to get recognized by the bacterial world; there are already naturally-occurring strains that will eat PET under the right conditions. [phys.org] There's talk of splicing the phthalate-eating gene into more hardy bacteria to help with ocean and landfill cleanup.
We one day may live in a world where plastic bottles are expected to rot over time just like wood does. Interesting times are ahead.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:15PM
My bet however is that we always had lignin eating bacteria during the Carboniferous Period, but they couldn't keep up with the rate of deposition of lignin and other plant material until atmospheric CO2 levels had dropped a bunch, plants didn't fall over so much (such as the more stable tree ferns), and Pangea was formed with a huge interior desert. Looking through the Wikipedia discussion of the transition between Carboniferous and the following Permian Period, there was a huge drop off of rainforest [wikipedia.org] which almost disappeared at the boundary between the two periods and a lot of discussion of climate changes and emergence of new flora such as seed ferns and conifers which appeared more efficient with their use of carbon.
(Score: 2) by Username on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:57PM
Naïve larvae that come across these plastic particles believe that it's a resource that they need to ingest large amounts of, almost like teens only eating unhealthy fast foods
Well, isn’t that the solution right there? Breed a lot of these perch and release them in high quantities. They spawn the larva will eat the plastic, die, and sink to the bottom becoming sediment.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:32AM
Dead fish don't necessarily sink. Sometimes they float. Fish that die and sink don't necessarily become fossils. Some are consumed by benthic organisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benthic_zone [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:59AM
They are already eating insulation in Galaxy Note 7's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:05PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:16PM
We don't do enough to reduce silly plastic usage, but here are the things that we find are not a large burden, here in the USA 'burbs;
+ Compost vegetable matter (save on trash, which in turn saves on trash bags)
+ Use reusable shopping bags (when we remember, maybe half the time)
+ Avoid extra packaging (don't take an extra bag for fresh produce unless it's really wet or messy)
+ Rinse and reuse the produce bags that we do take and recycle the rest back to the store (we buy very few plastic bags)
+ Avoid many pre prepared foods (avoid the packaging), fix meals from fresh ingredients
+ This state has a bottle bill (5 cent deposit) so there is relatively little plastic bottle litter
More??
A really hardcore couple of artists that I know won't let any guests bring plastic disposables into their house unless they are prepared to "pack them out". They don't purchase anything in plastic packaging and have none to dispose of in their local dump/landfill.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:43PM
I have been puzzled by this for years. This state switched from thin free plastic bags to 15c thick plastic bags a few years ago. It used to be that you would go shopping, use 5 to 10 thin (free!!!!) bags, unload the shopping at home, then use the bag as a bin liner an pack the rest away or toss them. Nowadays everyone buys the thick 15c "reusable" plastic bags for which mostly make it home without the handle breaking for which are broken by the first use. They can be used as trash can liners. They can be taken back to the store for recycling into whoknowswhat plastic stuff. Hardly anyone does. So we swapped people tossing out thin plastic bags for thick heavy plastic bags. Except that they charge for the thick ones, I am not seeing the difference here.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @09:19PM
Perches are saying "fuck you swede fucks!"
Norskis rule!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @12:14AM
"But Lord Yuppa, how could they have possibly polluted the entire earth?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @01:12AM
It's because humans are infinitely intelligent... at doing really dumb and harmful things!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @12:07PM
All these million tons of un-degraded plastic is sequestered carbon.
And when "environmentalists" simultaneously scream about atmospheric CO2 *and* "non-biodegradable" plastics - either they are dumber than European perch larvae, or they expect that level of dumb from their flock.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @12:21PM
Or, consider that there just might be more than one type of pollution that damages our environment. To put it bluntly, sequestering carbon in plastic is not a good idea. Better to leave that carbon in the ground by not using the oil feedstock to make the plastic in the first place.