Egger stresses that TOC wants to make sure its plastic cleanup efforts are helping marine life, not harming it. But it’s more complicated than just trying to minimize the amount of marine life taken from the ocean along with the plastic, he says. If crustaceans or sea anemones from other regions cling to plastic debris and travel to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they could feed on neuston there. So is it right or wrong to remove these invaders, who may be disrupting the local ecosystem? “There is always marine life associated with plastic,” says Egger. “But very often, it’s the marine life that doesn’t belong there, because the plastic doesn’t belong there.”
TO published study in mid-April offers some clues as to which traveling species might be a problem. Researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center examined 105 pieces of plastic debris that they had obtained in frozen form from TOC. They found traces of species normally found in coastal waters that had used floating plastic as rafts and ended up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, particularly nets, ropes, buoys, boxes, and eel traps from the fishing industry. Some species also seemed to breed in their new home on the high seas. For example, some shrimp-like amphipods carried eggs in their brood pouches.
This is not surprising, says Martin Thiel, a professor of marine biology at the Catholic University of the North in Chile. Marine organisms have been found. colonizing all manner of floating materials in the ocean, including volcanic pumice, seaweed, and wood, at least until these items begin to degrade and sink. Whether it’s organisms that settle on more durable plastic debris or float to the surface alongside it, Thiel says they simply can’t be separated from plastic. “What’s there, we better leave it alone, because by removing it, we can do more damage,” he says.
Lanna Cheng, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, is somewhat less concerned. Sometimes the neustons float between plastics, sometimes they don’t. Some neuston are capable of swimming up and down. And storms can come and mix things up. Because neuston aggregations appear to be so patchy, bycatch probably won’t significantly affect their populations, she says. And because TOC invests so much time and resources in voyages on the high seas, she appreciates the organization’s contribution to science by offering marine biologists like herself opportunities to collect samples. “The surface community [of marine life] it is a community that was barely studied until plastic pollution became a problem. Part of the reason was that there was very little economic value,” she says. Cheng herself has spent her career studying insects that have evolved into literally walk in the open ocean and survive
Helm, however, remains critical, partly because she believes studies should first show no impact on Neuston, before any cleanups take place. “If they really do the job and show that their efforts have no impact on life on the surface of the ocean, I’ll be excited to see that they’ve accepted the criticism and made changes,” she says. A crucial change was recently made for neustonian species. In May 2023, TOC more than doubled the length of its network barrier, which now stretches to 1,750 meters. As part of the upgrade, the mesh size of the nets in the holding area, where the plastic is held before it is loaded onto the boats, has been increased from 10 to 50 square millimeters. This should allow very small creatures like blue buttons and purple snails to fit through the nets, but wind sailors, for example, can grow larger than this. However, if you increase the mesh size more than this, bits of debris could start to filter through.
The two sky-blue ships are crossing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch again, testing the updated barrier in hopes they can collect more plastic per trip. Ridding the open ocean of plastic remains a Sisyphus task. As more plastic enters the patch and scientists learn more about the creatures that live there, TOC still has many hurdles to overcome before it can scale up its operations. “Our purpose is to help those agencies, but you have to make sure that the shape You help is really helping them,” says Egger. “And that’s what we’re trying to find out.”
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