Floating debris – useful vessels or harmful rafts?

Drifting plastic rafts of usefulness. Who would have thought that – definitely not me when I began my research into plastics in our Oceans.

On the outset, I stood firmly in the camp that plastic debris – our mismanaged rubbish - in the ocean is all bad, until I read the interesting paper by Goldstein and colleagues (2012). The paper talks about how the sea skater, Halobates sericeus, uses floating plastic debris for eggs deposits. The authors demonstrate this species’ resourcefulness at using a modern day twist on more traditional vessels of wood, squid backbones or volcanic pumice. With the abundance of plastic debris in the oceans, this relatively new source for laying their eggs on serves this species well. 

This shows one way our waste is being useful… kind of…

 However, there is a flip side to the usefulness of plastic debris in our marine environment and that is as a transportation method whereby non-native species are hitching rides on man-made objects to jettison to new frontiers. Derriak (2002), Eriksen and colleagues (2013), and Gall & Thompson (2015) all mention in their research papers about this very thing. Non-native species arriving to new countries, and the travel paid essentially by people all over the planet unknowingly. However, for some countries, such as New Zealand which has a high rate of endemism in our fauna and flora, this is a potential risk to biosecurity. One that boarder control could very easily miss as just a pile of rubbish.

References:

Derraik, J. G. (2002). The pollution of the marine environment by plastic debris: a review. Marine pollution bulletin, 44(9), 842-852.

Eriksen, M., Maximenko, N., Thiel, M., Cummins, A., Lattin, G., Wilson, S., & Rifman, S. (2013). Plastic pollution in the South Pacific subtropical gyre. Marine pollution bulletin, 68(1), 71-76.

Gall, S. C., & Thompson, R. C. (2015). The impact of debris on marine life. Marine pollution bulletin, 92(1), 170-179.

Goldstein, M. C., Rosenberg, M., & Cheng, L. (2012). Increased oceanic microplastic debris enhances oviposition in an endemic pelagic insect. Biology letters, 8(5), 817-820.