Plastic Debris Affects on Wildlife

Our group has chosen to focus mainly on the negative effects that marine plastic debris has on wildlife and marine ecosystems. Unfortunately, people don’t tend to worry about problems unless it affects them individually or someone they’re close with. As a result, the issues that marine plastic debris causes for aquatic organisms can go unnoticed and unchanged. We hope that our group can raise awareness about the dangers of plastic debris and maybe even inspire people to actively combat the issue.

Our research indicates that three of the main issues that arise from abundant amounts of marine plastic debris are ingestion, entanglement and smothering of the sea floor. Ingestion can lead to undernourishment due to false feelings of satiety and absorption of toxins contained in plastics (among other things). Both of these effects could be fatal. Entanglement can have similar effects. Fish or other forms of wildlife can get caught in plastics of some kind or “ghost nets” and not be able to escape. Additionally, smothering that occurs on the seafloor can inhibit the exchange of gas between pore water and seawater and even ruin once pristine ecosystems.

To get an understanding of how widespread these effects can be we’ve also accumulated research that describes the abundance and travel tendencies of plastics in the world’s waters. One reason that society loves using plastics is that they’re durable. However, this poses a problem once they are thrown in the oceans because it means they will remain there for a very long time. Also, even when they do break down they turn into plastic fragments as opposed to just disappearing. This means that even smaller organisms can be affected. One study, through collecting debris samples with nets and scanning them using infrared spectroscopy, determined that levels of plastic fragments have been increasing over time. To make matters even worse, plastics have an amazing ability to float to even the most remote places on the planet. Basically, there is no escaping them.

Not wanting to have such a pessimistic topic, we also managed to find possible solutions to prevent the marine plastic debris issue. Our sources have suggested pushing for more biodegradable plastics, passing legislation limiting use of plastics, encouraging people to recycle more and constructing barriers at points where plastics are likely to enter the oceans. These recommendations can’t completely solve the marine plastic issue that the world faces today, but hopefully it can prevent all of the Earth’s waters from turning into the Gowanus Canal!

 

Zooplankton Lunch Special: Plastics

Five Films, a UK based film company invested in sharing the stories of our Earth and biology filmed for the first time in recorded scientific history the event of zooplankton eating plastics. Although a seemingly mundane discovery, this evidence of microorganisms filling their tiny little bellies with plastics provides more backing to the claim that plastics are affecting our marine life in a fundamental way. So in order to eat, the little plankton guy stirs up all the water surrounding him in a frenzy of limbs and eats up all the foodstuffs he draws into his mouth from the water. In this case, the foodstuffs being plastics. As observed in the video, the plastics are the florescent green beads in the water, and you can see the plankton eating and having the plastics in their bodies. Now, from our research in class, and basic knowledge of the plastics that exist in the oceans, it is not too surprising to find out that the plankton are eating the micro pieces of plastics which makeup the majority of plastic pollution in the ocean. The significance of this video is the amount and concentration of plastics eaten by the plankton, and how this affects the biology of our oceans. It is almost impossible/very very hard to know the correction concentrations of plastics in the ocean because we as individuals/ scholars, and the scientific community do not exactly how big our ocean is. So its very hard to calculate how the presence of plastics and the organisms who eat them when we can’t accurately measure the body in which they live in. But when we can know is that these feeding habit it altering our ocean ecosystem in ways we don’t entirely understand yet. Plastics are unnatural substances, and so when something like, i don’t know, a plankton per-say eats it, their insides get a little funky. So if we follow the food chain oceanic game of “The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” it would look as follows: the plankton ate the plastic, and the crab ate the plankton, and the fish ate the crab, and then the person ate the fish. Why did the plankton eat the plastic? It’s not that we don’t know why, it is because there is so much of it in a micro sense in the ocean that zooplankton inevitably ingest it while eating. Now this is a problem for all of us for a number of reasons, the main points being that a) our ecosystems are changed because of the presence of plastics, and b) we ourselves could be harmed by eating/ having the presence of plastics in out marine life, big and small. Relating back to our research, this video helps visual the statistics of plastics being gathered in the ocean, and the affects it has on our ocean life. Also, look at the plankton, it’s pretty cool to watch them eat.

ITF office hours for Wednesday, October 14

FYI, to make up for the missed hours on Monday due to Columbus Day, I’ll be holding office hours on Wednesday, October 14 from 1-2 pm and 3:30-4:45 pm. Stop by and get help with your assignments, get feedback on your eportfolio posts or your eportfolio site, or to get some suggestions about educational technology/digital tools for students. I’d also love to hear what kinds of help, tools, or info that you’d like to see on this website!

 

 

How do marine plastics affect us anyway? (Group 2’s research)

 

This video was posted on Youtube by a nonprofit organization called Seas at Risks, which aims to influence public policy regarding the protection of the marine environment. Although this video is quite comical, featuring cartoon characters singing about plastics ending up in the marine environment, it is also informative because it illustrates the apathetic perspective of many humans regarding the marine plastics issue. Many people know about the marine plastic problem, but not many care enough about the problem to do anything to combat it, probably because they don’t see the effect it will have on them directly. My group has decided to focus our Science Forward research on how marine plastics impact humans, in order to prove that plastics in the oceans is an issue people should care about because it actually does have an effect on individuals.

One study my group came across in their research was a paper describing an experiment conducted by Chelsea Rochman, who is part of the Department of Anatomy, Physiology, and cell biology at the University of California. In this experiment, two groups of fish were examined. In one group, pellets containing plastics were placed in the water the fish were swimming in. In the other group, no plastic pellets were placed. After two months, it was determined that the fish that may have ingested plastic showed an increase in harmful substances like PCBs. A statistical analysis was conducted and although the presence of PCBs in the fish that may have eaten plastic was not found to be statistically significant, that doesn’t mean that the plastic couldn’t have caused this increase. The results of the statistical analysis could be attributed to small sample size or less plastic ingested than would be ingested in the open ocean. Plastic consumption can very well be harming fish that humans will ultimately eat.

Taking this study into account along with our other research, our group has recognized that thinking about how marine plastics will affect humans is a topic that allows for a personal connection. Marine plastics affect humans and although our research is far from over, we are starting to see the negative effects plastics have.

 

 

The Plastics Highway to Trinidad and Tobago

A CUNY colleague of mine shared this short video shared on the Facebook page of the Papa Bois Conservation organization in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s short and simple, but describes how plastic waste from far away places washes up on the shores of this Caribbean Island. Note that the sources of many of these items can be determined by the markings and information found on the bottles and other debris. The fact that the information survives the journey across the seas from Guyana to Trinidad speaks to the durability of the plastics, and why they have become such a distinctive and ubiquitous feature of the Anthropocene.

https://www.facebook.com/PapaBoisConservation/videos/vb.125242457570720/895730293855262/?type=2&theater

How to Post to This Site

This post includes instructions for posting to the Science Forward site. The previous post included this link for students to submit their email address so they could be added to the site: http://goo.gl/forms/4wG2fE5dek.

  1. Once I have your email address, I’ll send you an invite to join the site as an author. After accepting the invite and logging into the eportfolio site, “Science Forward at Brooklyn College” will appear when you hover your cursor over “My Sites” (upper-left corner of screen).
  2. To create a post, go to the top of your screen and click New > Post.
  3. Write your post. Note: if you have trouble writing your posts or need some feedback, that would be a great reason to attend ITF office hours!
  4. Add your post to the correct categories before publishing: click “student post” and the box for your assigned group (Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, Group 4) from the menu at the right side of the screen.
  5. Add tags to your post for easy indexing. Try to choose tags based on your post’s topic, the type of post that you’ve created, and author info. For example, this post has been tagged “itf post” and “how to,” and my previous post is tagged “ocean garbage patches,” “pop culture,” and “announcements” (among others).

If you have any issues posting to the site, please contact me or visit office hours. You can send me an email at acarrozza@gradcenter.cuny.edu or send me a message by clicking on my eportfolio profile, @alexiscarrozza.

 

ITF announcements: why you should attend office hours & ocean garbage patches on Comedy Central

Some announcements and suggestions from Alexis, your friendly ITF:

Become an author on this site! If you haven’t already done so, please take the time to fill out this Google form so that you can be added to this site as an author. It won’t take long and it’s essential to your coursework in Science Forward! Access the form here: http://goo.gl/forms/WtnN9uuYJz.

Canceled: ITF office hours for Thursday, Oct. 8. Please email me to make an appointment for next week’s office hours on Monday or Thursday afternoons: acarrozza@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Why not visit Prof. Branco during office hours? Students tend to avoid office hours because it’s not clear what they should do or ask during office hours. The University of Michigan put together a great list of reasons for attending office hours along with some practical tips: Top 5 Reasons to Use Office Hours & Tips for Using the Time Effectively

“I was swept into some kind of floating trash vortex in the middle of the ocean.” Given the current course topic of ocean garbage patches, check out this clip from the television show Review on Comedy Central in which one man reviews life, one task at a time. Watch Forrest Macneil (played by the hilarious Andy Daly) encounter a garbage patch when asked to review “spending alone time in a rowboat.”