Corals eat plastic because weve made it tasty, study suggests
Source: Washington Post
Ocean plastic is an indiscriminate hazard. It harms fish and kills seabirds, which wash up with bellies full of trash. Turtles swallow it because, the thinking goes, they mistake the floating waste for jellyfish. Less well known are the ways plastic damages the ocean's smaller inhabitants, plankton and corals, which sometimes are found with particles wedged in their teeny guts.
For years, biologists and conservationists assumed that most sea creatures ate plastic by accident, said Alexander Seymour, a geographic information systems analyst and marine researcher at Duke University in North Carolina. Marine life, it seemed, was too confused or too hungry to avoid the junk.
A small but growing number of studies suggests another more disturbing reason. Humans may have invented plastic that is appetizing.
“Plastics may be inherently tasty,” said Austin Allen, a Duke marine science doctoral student. Allen and Seymour are the lead authors of a study just published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin. Along with Duke marine ecologist Daniel Rittschof, they demonstrated that corals respond to microplastic fragments as though they were food.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/30/corals-eat-plastic-because-weve-made-it-tasty-study-suggests/?utm_term=.fde19de481c8
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