Microplastics: In Skin Of Wild & Farmed Fish, Ice Cores, Crab Gills, Deep-Sea Sediment, Mussels . .
Scientists are looking for -- and finding -- little bits of plastic in a lot of places lately: ice cores, deep sea sediments, coral reefs, crab gills, the digestive system of mussels, even German beer. Now, new research suggests they need not actually be searching for the man-made material to discover it.
"We never thought of looking for plastic," said Javier Gomez Fernandez, a biologist at Singapore University of Technology and Design. His team's accidental finding of plastic in the skin of both farmed and wild fish, published online this month in the supplementary section of their unrelated peer-reviewed paper, adds to already growing environmental and public health concerns about the plastic particles pervading our oceans and waterways.
Over time, waves and sunlight break down large chunks of plastic, leaving the remnants of discarded packaging, bottles and bags nearly invisible to the naked eye. These so-called microplastics, particles under a millimeter across, may pose big troubles, experts warn.
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Fernandez and his colleagues from Harvard University and the University of Washington had been investigating the presence of a natural substance called chitin when they also began detecting a foreign material in the farmed Atlantic salmon, and wild haddock and carp. To their surprise, the little particles entrapped in the filmy fish skin -- averaging about one-tenth the width of a pinhead (0.1 millimeters) -- turned out to be various types of plastic, including polystyrene, or Styrofoam. "There is an absolute lack of knowledge on the impact of plastic at that scale or even where it goes," said Fernandez. "We have found that when it is small enough it acquires the ability to be entrapped in the mucosa of marine animals." "We don't know the extent of this process, or if it happens in other animals. But it definitely points to the need of evaluating this issue in more detail," he added, noting that humans have mucosa in the digestive tract.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/23/plastic-ocean-pollution-fish-health_n_6923872.html