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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 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.