The plastic islands made up of floating waste in the open sea are starting to become habitats for some marine animals that normally live on the coasts, so much so that they have given rise to new forms of ‘neopelagic’ communities. To say it is a study campaign in the Pacific Ocean led by Linsey Haram, of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, whose results were published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
For years now, in all seas there have been real islands of floating waste, made mainly of plastic of all kinds and remains of fishing nets, which can also be very large and are a danger for many marine animals that can get trapped in the debris or exchange them for food. But over time these huge ‘rafts’ continuously remodeled by the waves and currents are also becoming habitats for many marine species. By collecting 105 debris samples during a study campaign carried out between 2018 and 2019 in the North Pacific, American researchers found the presence, in 70% of the debris, of species that normally live along the coasts, in particular small arthropods and molluscs.
In total, the samplings led to the identification of 484 marine invertebrate organisms on the debris, of which 80% were species normally found in coastal habitats and which would now seem to have adapted to this new environment. The preferred objects would above all be drifting fishing nets and the authors suggest that these communities would be able to reproduce by now becoming stable in some way and giving life to new small ecosystems that can be defined as ‘neopelagic communities’.
Source: Ansa
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