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.

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.