Flip-Flop: Suddenly Pacific Garbage Patch is ‘gathering place for life’
The North Pacific “Garbage Patch” aggregates an abundance of floating sea creatures, as well as the plastic waste it has become infamous for, according to a study published in PLOS Biology and co-authored by oceanographers in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).
Marine surface-dwelling organisms, such as jellies, snails, barnacles and crustaceans, are a critical ecological link between diverse ecosystems, the study authors wrote, but very little is known about where these organisms are found. Plastic pollution provides a clue: the oceanographic forces that concentrate buoyant man-made waste and pollutants in “garbage patches,” may also aggregate floating life.
