This floating ocean garbage is home to a surprising amount of life from the coasts
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Out in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California, swirling currents have created a giant accumulation of floating garbage. It is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Scientists recently went looking to see what kinds of life might be making a home on that trash. And as NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports, they found something unexpected.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches across hundreds of thousands of square miles. Linsey Haram is a marine ecologist. She says a lot of the garbage is plastic.
LINSEY HARAM: People often think of it - or you might be tempted to envision it - as a large plastic island. That's not really the case.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Instead of an island, it's like a soup with big chunks, like snarls of fishing nets, bobbing in a broth made of little bits of plastic suspended in the water. Haram is a research associate with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. She and some colleagues wanted to see what kind of life had set up shop on this garbage, so they asked a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup to bring back some common kinds of floating trash.
HARAM: Like, some of our categories are bottles; we have buckets; we have crates - they look like laundry baskets, but they're actually used in fishing industry.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Haram expected to find marine life clinging to this stuff, but she thought it would mostly be species that are known to be adapted to living far out in the open ocean. After all, the ocean and the coasts are different in terms of temperature, salinity, the amount of available nutrients. But one of the first pieces of junk she saw made her rethink her assumption. It was a buoy.
HARAM: There were these very frilly, beautiful hydroids, which kind of look like orange feathers.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's a critter related to jellyfish and a species that normally lives on the coast, not on the high seas.
HARAM: It was just so prominent. I was like, OK (laughter). You know, they're - we're actually going to see something here.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The researchers examined 105 pieces of trash. In the journal "Nature, Ecology And Evolution," they say 70% had coastal species on them. They found dozens of coastal species, everything from anemones to little crustaceans to worms.
HARAM: A hundred and five pieces of plastic, in the grand scheme of things, isn't a lot (laughter). So to find that many coastal species on a relatively small sample size was shocking (laughter).
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Plus, they saw signs that some were reproducing out there. Of course, the trash was also home to a lot of creatures that were already known to live way out in the ocean. They were living right next to their new neighbors from the coast and surely interacting with them. Sabine Rech is a marine biologist in Chile with the Universidad Catolica del Norte. She wasn't on the research team, but has studied life on garbage in the South Pacific.
SABINE RECH: I was surprised that they saw such high numbers of coastal species.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She says it's long been known that species from the coast can occasionally travel, like maybe on floating pieces of wood or attached to a ship.
RECH: But now, with the latest research, we see that it's just something that is normal now, that is happening all the time now, and that actually means that it's a huge risk.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She says plastic trash seems to let coastal species colonize the open ocean and increases the chances that they could go to new places and become invasive. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
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