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MARINE DEBRIS
Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist at the University
of California, Davis, has been trying to answer a
dismal question: Is everything terrible, or are
things just very, very bad?
Rochman is a member of the National Center for
Ecological Analysis and Synthesis’s marine-debris
working group, a collection of scientists who
study, among other things, the growing problem of
marine debris, also known as ocean trash. Plenty
of studies have sounded alarm bells about the state
of marine debris; in a recent paper published in the
journal Ecology, Rochman and her colleagues set
out to determine how many of those perceived
risks are real.
Often, Rochman says, scientists will end a paper
by speculating about the broader impacts of what
they’ve found. For example, a study could show
that certain seabirds eat plastic bags and go on to
warn that whole bird populations are at risk of
dying out. ‘But the truth was that nobody had yet
tested those perceived threats,’ Rochman says.
‘There wasn’t a lot of information.’
Rochman and her colleagues examined more than
a hundred papers on the impacts of marine debris
that were published through 2013. Within each
paper, they asked what threats scientists had
studied – 366 perceived threats in all – and what
they’d actually found.
In 83 percent of cases, the perceived dangers of
ocean trash were proven true. In the remaining
cases, the working group found the studies had
weaknesses in design and content which affected
the validity of their conclusions – they lacked a
control group, for example, or used faulty
statistics.
Strikingly, Rochman says, only one well-designed
study failed to find the effect it was looking for, an
investigation of mussels ingesting microscopic
bits. The plastic moved from the mussels’
stomachs to their bloodstreams, scientists found,
and stayed there for weeks – but didn’t seem to
stress out the shellfish.
While mussels may be fine eating trash, though,
the analysis also gave a clearer picture of the many
ways that ocean debris is bothersome.
Within the studies they looked at, most of the
proven threats came from plastic debris, rather
than other materials like metal or wood. Most of
the dangers also involved large pieces of debris –
animals getting entangled in trash, for example, or
eating it and severely injuring themselves.
But a lot of ocean debris is ‘microplastic’, or
pieces smaller than five millimeters. These may be
ingredients used in cosmetics and toiletries, fibers
shed by synthetic clothing in the wash, or eroded
remnants of larger debris. Compared to the
number of studies investigating large-scale debris,
Rochman’s group found little research on the
effects of these tiny bits. ‘There are a lot of open
questions still for microplastic,’ Rochman says,
though she notes that more papers on the subject
have been published since 2013, the cutoff point
for the group’s analysis.
There are also, she adds, a lot of open questions
about the ways that ocean debris can lead to sea-
creature death. Many studies have looked at how
plastic affects an individual animal, or that
animal’s tissues or cells, rather than whole
populations. And in the lab, scientists often use
higher concentrations of plastic than what is really
in the ocean. None of that tells us how many birds
or fish or sea turtles could die from plastic
pollution – or how deaths in one species could
affect that animal’s predators, or the rest of the
ecosystem.
‘We need to be asking more ecologically relevant
questions,’ Rochman says. Usually, scientists do
not know exactly how disasters such as a tanker
accidentally spilling its whole cargo of oil and
polluting huge areas of the ocean will affect the
environment until after they’ve happened. ‘We
don’t ask the right questions early enough,’ she
says. But if ecologists can understand how the
slow-moving effect of ocean trash is damaging
ecosystems, they might be able to prevent things
from getting worse.
Asking the right questions can help policy makers,
and the public, figure out where to focus their
attention. The problems that look or sound most
dramatic may not be the best places to start. For
example, the name of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage
Patch’ – a collection of marine debris in the
northern Pacific Ocean – might conjure up a vast,
floating trash island. Though, much of the debris is
tiny or below the surface; a person could sail
through the area without seeing any trash at all. A
Dutch group called ‘The Ocean Cleanup’ is
currently working on plans to put mechanical
devices in the Pacific Garbage Patch and similar
areas to suck up plastic. But a recent paper used
simulations to show that strategically positioning
the cleanup devices closer to shore would more
effectively reduce pollution over the long term.
‘I think clearing up some of these misperceptions
is really important,’ Rochman says. Among
scientists as well as in the media, she says, ‘A lot
of the images about strandings and entanglement
and all of that cause the perception that plastic
debris is killing everything in the ocean.’
Interrogating the existing scientific literature can
help ecologists figure out which problems really
need addressing, and which ones they would be
better off – like the mussels – absorbing and
ignoring.
