Cut to the chase Miss Ocean! What were you finding?

‘Let it be said straight up that what we came upon was not a mountain of trash, an island of trash, or a swirling vortex of trash-all media concocted embellishments of the truth. It was and is a thin plastic soup, lightly seasoned with plastic flakes, bulked out with dumplings; buoys, net clumps, floats, crates and other macro debris. –Plastic Ocean, Captain Charles Moore.

When I signed on to participate in this research expedition I already had the Western Garbage Patch pictured in my mind; a huge circulating mass of trash floating around, a mass so dense I was afraid our bow would not be able to make it through.  This was not the case at all! “Okay so what, there is a bunch of trash floating in the ocean, just go out with a boat and some nets and clean it up”-average person. Seems logical right? WRONG! Scattered throughout all the oceans of the world are minute pieces of plastic, floating around in the water column, presenting itself as food for marine organisms, and encroaching its way into an eco-system where it will live forever. Over the course of three weeks, we conducted 21 high speed trawls and 21 manta trawls in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any country or coastline. In every single trawl sample we discovered pieces of plastic; plastic film, burned plastic, crate and bucket fragments, Styrofoam, and most commonly tiny plastic pellets called nerdles. These pre-production plastic pellets are the first step of any plastic product. They are shipped in containers all around the world by the billions, finding their way through cracks and crevices and ending up in our oceans and on our beaches worldwide.

In all of our samples we had by catch of micro and macro organisms; halobates, copepods, terrapods, juvenile fish, jellyfish and myctophids (family of lanternfish that make up a large biomass of fish in the ocean). At night myctophids do a vertical migration to feed on micro organisms like the ones mentioned above. Minute pieces of plastic are often disguised with floating zooplankton, leaving these fish victim to plastic ingestion. Sad stuff huh? Do you know what’s even sadder? Filter feeding fish are not the only ones ingesting this stuff. Pelagic and reef species of fish have all incorporated plastic involuntarily into their diet. Because plastic is benign,their systems they cannot process or break down this material; leaving in their system....forever.

It was estimated by Dr. Hank Carson that every 8 minutes we saw a piece of marine debris floating by. Daily we scouted the seas for macro debris and found anything from tiny pieces of plastic to huge buoys, jackets, glass bulbs, it was ridiculous. But this was not our biggest discovery. Stay tuned there’s more.

                                         Floating debris captured

                                         Algal growth on plastic bottle  

                                         One of many buoys captured

                                         Gooseneck barnacles grow on floating debris

                                         Black floats I discovered while on debris watch

                                         Fish make floating debris their home

                                         Red bulb with more barnacles

                                        Crab found on styrofoamm, notice bitemark from a fish possibly All marine debris photos by Dr. Hank Carson

                                         A trawl sample w/ juvie mahi on bucket fragments

                                         Plastic nerdle in the middle, burned plastic to the right

                                         Trawl samples

                                         Night sample w/ myctophid

                                         Notice the tiny plastic pieces in this sample

                                         Piece of plastic shaped like the state of Ohio

                                                   Hank rocking the jacket found floating in the Pacific