Ocean Plastics Host Surprising Microbial Array

MTorrice writes "A surprising suite of microbial species colonizes plastic waste floating in the ocean, according to a new study. The bacteria appeared to burrow pits into the plastic. One possible explanation is that bacteria eat into the polymers, weakening the pieces enough to cause them to break down more quickly and eventually sink to the sea floor. While the microbes could speed the plastic's decay, they might also cause their own ecological problems, the researchers say."

Comments

Re:Isn't this what we would expect.

[girlintraining]

Despite the hype, plastics are still very chemically similar to the organic compounds they are made from.

Know what the difference is between Strychnine and LSD is, chemically? There isn't one. But the way the atoms are arranged will make the difference between a pleasant experience and a painful death.

There are a few lab-produced chemicals that are truly foreign to the biosphere, but plastics are much more familiar to the ecology than we were told each Earth Day.

If right now I pushed a button and humanity suffered a total existance failure, in a thousand years there would be no buildings. No concrete. No roads. There would be almost nothing left that could still be identified as foreign, still identified as having been left by humans. Except plastic. Most of our plastic will still be here, in the same form we molded them from, thousands of years from now. Nuclear waste breaks down faster than plastic.

The main argument for plastic alienation is that the dominant oil-eating organisms are deep ocean dwellers and all the testing was done in standard landfill conditions with the sorts of fungi and bacteria that thrive in anaerobic mud.

Actually, the main arguments is that most plastic production depends on dead dino juice and there's only a limited supply of it, that it doesn't break down on less than a geological timescale, that it's difficult to re-use, and as it shreds itself down to the molecular level, it becomes a poison that infests the entire food chain.. and is now appearing in our own blood and tissue samples in detectable quantities, as well as being linked to all manner of health problems.