Garbage patch kids

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Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Between Hawaii and California, there's a lot of garbage.

It's called the Great Pacific Pacific Garbage Patch.

We've all heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

A swirling soup of plastic debris floating in the midst of five hot spots around the world where ocean currents sweep together plastic plastic plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic bottles.

By some estimates, there are 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic there.

But even so, Most of the plastic in the ocean is somewhere else, underwater even.

Which means all the focus on the garbage patch and what to do with it, and all this focus on how to deal with the plastic that's in the ocean, maybe we're looking at it in the wrong way.

Maybe the question is, how is the ocean itself dealing with it?

Both of us were just like, what?

Yeah, like, what?

This is going to be a very different experience than we thought.

This is Lindsay Harrim.

In 2018, She was working at the Smithsonian with another researcher named Jim Carlton, studying something called rafting.

It's when species are transported across water by hanging onto floating debris, like a piece of driftwood or plastic.

There's no fixed distance.

You can raft across a bay, you can raft within Long Island Sound, or you can raft across the oceans.

It's really rare, but it happens.

That's how we explain how a lot of species got to the Hawaiian Islands.

They rafted there on plant material, on trees, on whatever natural material there was before there were humans, putting things in the ocean.

But it's something you never actually see.

You can stand on the shores of the Hawaiian Islands for your entire career, 50, 60, 70 years, and you will never, ever see anything raft in.

Even if it was rare, Jim and Lindsay thought maybe they might be able to catch some of these animals mid-journey, rafting on the garbage in the garbage patch.

And their opportunity came in December 2018.

Lindsay Harrim and I met one of the ships that had been collecting that debris and was bringing it back to San Francisco.

They got their hands on some trash from the Pacific garbage patch.

Things like fishing nets and ropes and bottles and flower pots.

And then actually getting the samples into the lab, opening them up.

They were expecting to see maybe some animals clinging onto the plastic, but even if they did, those animals would probably be in pretty rough shape.

I think one of the first things that we

looked at was a large, it was a large buoy,

like you would have attached to a boat.

And

it

had coastal species on it.

Coastal, meaning species that live in places like coral reefs or marshes or in tide pools, stuff like anemones and barnacles.

They're not creatures that you typically find out in the middle of the ocean.

But as they went through the samples, they saw coastal species on almost every single piece.

We began to realize just the extent to which these coastal species were now living in the open ocean on almost entirely plastic debris.

They saw anemones that were in different stages of development and like actively reproducing.

And it was like, oh my gosh,

they are doing well out here.

This wasn't just rafting.

These creatures weren't hitchhiking on a dangerous journey, barely clinging on to life.

Instead, they had found a new home in the middle of the ocean.

It just totally, it blew our minds, and we realized that this was going to be definitely a very different story than what we were expecting.

Without intending to, humans have created a whole new kind of ecosystem out in the open ocean, one built on garbage.

It was an uh-oh moment.

It really was.

And sobering that the unexpected cascade of plastic pollution, of the millions and billions of pieces of plastic floating in the sea, had actually introduced a new habitat to the ocean.

That was an uh-oh and a deep sigh.

I'm Manding Wynn, and this week on Unexplainable, just what have we created out in the furthest reaches of the ocean?

For a long time, scientists like Jim thought coastal species couldn't survive long in the open ocean.

I have been teaching my marine ecology students for the past 25 years that this was impossible.

Coastal species evolved in really resource-rich habitats.

You can think of crabs in a coral reef that's full of kelp and plankton, or also mussels attached to rocks near the seashore.

Dropping those animals in the open ocean would be like trying to plant a redwood tree in a desert.

It was a one-way trip.

You were dead.

There's no habitat like reefs out there.

There's the sun, which can quickly roast you.

There's also not really any food.

We thought, you know, that would limit coastal species from being able to live or at least reproduce in the open ocean.

But the coastal species on Jim and Lindsay's plastic samples were doing just fine.

Something was sustaining them.

What are they eating and what's eating them?

These are all very basic questions, but very challenging to answer, especially in the open ocean.

Jim and Lindsay don't know, but it isn't unheard of for an environment to be transformed from an inhospitable one to a hospitable one.

It's a part of something called ecological succession.

Succession is just the development of an ecological community over time,

and it surprisingly takes similar pathways across ecosystem types.

Succession starts when a new surface opens up.

This can happen after a glacier retreats, which reveals the barren rock below, or when a recent lava flow hardens and becomes fresh new rock.

Or, in this case, when a bunch of plastic ends up in the ocean with a good amount of surface area for things to stick onto.

But just a surface isn't enough.

It needs life to transform it.

First, there will be early pioneers that will come in, they call them pioneers, early pioneers that come in, grow in that place, bacteria, fungi, microalgae, things like that that colonize and start to make the environment hospitable.

for the plant species.

These small forms of life, they don't need too much to survive.

And over time, they live, they die, they decompose, and they add nutrients back into their environment, which then makes it more habitable for other kinds of life to move in.

And then you have seaweeds that start forming.

We definitely saw a lot of seaweed already in place, like very well-developed communities of seaweeds.

These species, like seaweed, could provide a habitat and food for the next plants and animals to move in.

And then you have the marine invertebrates starting to colonize those pieces as well.

So that's the idea.

An organism hops on board, lives, dies, and then decomposes or becomes food for other organisms, and eventually a stable environment develops.

And this process could be happening on individual pieces of plastic in the garbage patch over and over and over again.

You have a full system

in a way.

You have a full food web possible on each piece.

They have a name for this new kind of ecosystem, neopelagic communities.

Pelagic, meaning the open ocean, neo as in a new altered version of it.

An ecosystem that's deeply intertwined with plastic.

It's

more like an evolution of the ecosystem, if you will.

And a point of of clarification here.

What's new isn't the fact that there's a living ecosystem out in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

There's historically been life out there.

There are these creatures called Neustin, and they've evolved to live on the open ocean surface.

They're things like water skaters and man-of-war jellyfish, and they're important for feeding a lot of the sea life out there.

What's new here is how the plastic is inviting a whole bunch of other creatures to this world.

It's that we now now see these additional, very different species in place with the historical ecosystems that we would find.

Ultimately, we don't know what this ecological succession on the ocean plastic will lead to.

We don't know what species clinging onto the plastic will survive over time or how they'll evolve or how they'll interact with each other and the native species that are already there.

We just hardly know anything about what could happen.

This is very much an ecological roulette.

That is a fundamental issue.

One parasite, one pathogen, one competitor, one predator could change that picture.

So those are the things that might keep us awake at night.

What do these new ecosystems mean for the future?

That's next.

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Oh, hi, thanks for checking in.

I'm still a piece of garbage.

These plastic worlds might have long-lasting repercussions on our ocean.

We don't know what they are yet, but we do know that these ecosystems are probably here to stay.

As long as there's plastic, I think so.

Jim Carlton also suspects that these communities aren't just in the Great Pacific garbage patch.

There are four other major ocean gyres.

Any day I expect to hear that someone's found coastal species out in one of the other gyres.

Absolutely.

And more plastic is going into the ocean every day, which means more potential habitat for coastal species and other creatures to take hold, especially as the world continues to change.

Climate change works into this.

Cyclonic activity will increase with climate change, hurricanes, cyclones, monsoons.

And all that plastic will drift around until it breaks down into microplastic, it lands somewhere, or it gets swept out into a gyre and becomes a habitat.

I see it as a habitat likely to be increasing, and therefore the whole phenomenon could certainly expand.

Coastal species on plastic might have big impacts on ocean life, but they could also impact life on the land.

They are not only populating the center of the ocean but can be then carried away by currents to yet new areas to colonize.

If the gyres become a bustling new ecosystem, There's a chance for these species to spread on ocean currents, rafting on the plastic.

And those currents could take that material to anywhere along the North American coast or to the Hawaiian Islands or even further.

That means that the Great Pacific garbage patch could spread life around the world to new coastlines, places they've never lived before, where they'd be invasive species with the potential to change entire ecosystems.

It's just a whole new world for us to investigate, which is again totally unexpected.

The implications here are really kind of freaky.

Like, we don't know how these ecosystems will impact the ocean, the land, and maybe us.

And Jim's also not sure how to feel about it.

It's often not a clear and clean dichotomy.

Whether these are good or bad, sometimes science can't help you with that.

For most of his career, Jim thought the open ocean couldn't be changed like this.

It was just too out there.

As a scientist, I regret that we have changed, and this is not just true of the open ocean, but any environment, that we have changed what was and can no longer study

a world, a natural world that came about as the result of millions of years of evolution and have turned some of these places into highly altered environments.

So what are we supposed to do here?

How are we supposed to feel about this?

We already know that all this ocean plastic is harmful to a lot of different animals, to the seabirds and fish and whales that end up dead after eating it.

I don't see anything particularly positive about seeding the ocean with a vast amount of plastic that then made it a habitat for species that never were there.

That doesn't feel kind of warm and fuzzy to me.

But on the other hand, Jim recognizes that non-native species living in new places aren't inherently bad.

Most of the things we eat in North America are not native.

Our agricultural systems are largely based upon non-native species.

We have cows and horses and dogs and cats and everything embedded in our culture.

At the same time, non-native species can absolutely be destructive to an ecosystem.

But we can't really predict the downstream effects of new species.

We just have to monitor them to know.

The question about introductions is what will they do to change what we value?

Overall, this ambiguity puts conservation efforts in a tricky spot.

Making sure plastic stays out of the ocean is important, and there's a lot of cleanup efforts out there trying to do just that.

But Lindsay Harrim, the scientist who worked closely with Jim, she says that life entangled in all the ocean plastic makes cleanup kind of complicated.

There's a question of like, should we be cleaning up the plastic if it's creating habitat in the open ocean?

That's important for marine species.

It's one thing to clean up plastic that's just been dumped in the water to protect the animals that live there.

But now we're talking about plastic where animals, and not just coastal species, have made a home.

Who are we to then clean it up?

Instead of focusing on cleaning up all the plastic that's already in the ocean, the scientists I spoke to agreed that we just really need to dump less plastic there in the first place.

One scientist even told me that scooping out ocean plastic is like trying to mop the floor while the bathtub is still overflowing.

There are unintended consequences to the plastic pollution crisis, and the effects felt by these changes are not felt within our homes.

Like, it's easy to think about this as an issue outside of our realms of interpretation, but it's directly because of what we do.

Plastic is going to keep being swept out to sea.

It's changing our world in unpredictable ways.

And by looking at the Great Pacific garbage patch and all the life that's found a home there, we're just starting to get a glimpse of how profound those changes might be.

This episode was reported and produced by Manding Wen.

It was edited by Brian Resnick and Jorge Just with help from me, Noam Hasenfeld, and Meredith Hodnott, who also manages our team.

Mixing and sound design from Erika Huang, music from Erika and me, fact-checking from Bashira Mack, Christian Ayala is getting some really important stuff done.

And Bird Pinkerton didn't exactly want to go out and talk to the scariest birds she'd ever heard of.

So she came up with a different plan.

I can't stop the birds on my own, she said.

I need to get the platypuses, the tortoises, the pufferfish on our side.

All the non-birds with beaks.

We need to fight together.

Special thanks to Rebecca Helm and Martin Thiel.

And if you want to hear more about plastic in the ocean, you might want to check out another episode we made a few years ago about how 99% of ocean plastic is missing.

We'll drop a link to that in the show notes.

And if you're already down there in the notes, you can find a link for show transcripts too.

If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us.

We're at unexplainable at vox.com.

And we'd love it if you left us a review or a rating.

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You can go to vox.com/slash give to give today.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

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