Plastic. In the stomach of a new creature discovered far below sea level: almost 7,000 meters deep in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean, between Japan and the Philippines and below the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Plastic pollution reaches unusual extremes. A sad reality.
Scientists have dubbed this new seabed animal “Eurythenes plasticus” to draw attention to the crisis of plastic pollution in our oceans .
The new species of amphipod is contaminated with PET-type plastic, which is used mainly to make water bottles and other beverages, clothing and household items. Although the coin-sized scavenger is new to science and lives in remote waters, its plastic pollution shows that it is not exempt from the impact of human pollution on our planet. Deep-sea amphipods are voracious eaters, not picky eaters at all, so they may be more susceptible to ingesting microplastics. Due to the scarcity of food available in the deep sea, these animals have adopted the ability to eat almost anything.
“Finding a new species that we didn’t know was there before and finding plastic in it just shows how widespread it is as a contaminant, ” said Johanna Weston, a doctoral student and leader of the work that publishes Zootaxa magazine. “We found a microfiber in a 6,900 meter sample and that microfiber was 83% similar to polyethylene terephthalate or PET.”
This plastic polymer generally used in water bottles does not degrade naturally in the environment. As it breaks down, PET becomes smaller and smaller, eventually breaking down into microplastics that appear in an increasing proportion of marine animals around the world. Once such microplastics reach the depths of the sea, they accumulate over time as they have nowhere else to go.
Regarding the scientific name of the new animal, Alan Jamieson, from the University of Newcastle in England, explains: “Unfortunately that was one of the most striking things that we found in the species and I think we have to write this down in the taxonomic record. making a statement to say that we are at the point where we are seeing a new species from an unexplored habitat that is already contaminated with plastic. We need to take immediate action to stop the deluge of plastic waste in our oceans, “says the expert.
The damage that the ingestion of microplastics can cause in these animals does not happen only by ingesting a piece of plastic, but also by the associated chemical products. As Jamieson explains, there are many other pollutants in the sea known as persistent organic pollutants or POPs. Most are hydrophobic , which means they don’t like water and don’t bond with anything else in the ocean, but they do love plastic. Plastics act as a magnet for POPs, collecting pollutants that eventually sink to the bottom of the ocean along with their host. Deep-sea animals that end up eating this plastic become contaminated with these chemicals, which are known to cause reproductive harm.
It is clear that what we are doing today can even affect animals that live thousands of meters below sea level. Nations around the world need to deal with this global disaster. Let us remember that the United Nations Environment Program warns that each year more than eight million tons of plastic end up in the oceans.
Referencia: New species of Eurythenes from hadal depths of the Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean (Crustacea: Amphipoda) JOHANNA N. J. WESTON, PRISCILLA CARRILLO-BARRAGAN, THOMAS D. LINLEY, WILLIAM D. K. REID, ALAN J. JAMIESON 2020 ZOOTAXA DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4748.1.9
