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Fish Are Eating Lots of Plastic (washingtonpost.com)
Matthew Savoca, writing for the Washington Post: As you bite down into a delicious piece of fish, you probably don't think about what the fish itself ate -- but perhaps you should. More than 50 species of fish have been found to consume plastic trash at sea (alternative source - a little old). This is bad news, not only for fish but potentially also for humans who rely on fish for sustenance. Fish don't usually die as a direct result of feeding on the enormous quantities of plastic trash floating in the oceans. But that doesn't mean it's not harmful for them. Some negative effects that scientists have discovered when fish consume plastic include reduced activity rates and weakened schooling behavior, as well as compromised liver function. Most distressingly for people, toxic compounds that are associated with plastic transfer to and bioaccumulate in fish tissues. This is troubling because these substances could further bioaccumulate in people who consume fish that have eaten plastic. Numerous species sold for human consumption, including mackerel, striped bass and Pacific oysters, have been found with these toxic plastics in their stomachs. So why are fish eating plastic? According to studies cited in the report, plastic debris may smell attractive to marine organisms.
If the fish are eating plastic, they're dumb as hell. So let's just not eat the dumb fish.
> So why are fish eating plastic? According to studies cited in the report, plastic debris may smell attractive to marine organisms.
I believe it. My cat loves to lick those plastic shopping bags from the grocery. According to the interwebz he is not alone, its because they taste like meat to some cats. Fortunately he has not yet tried to eat any of them.
Plastic is not a real concern. Mercury is a concern. People need to be educated on this shit and I don't always have the time to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_in_fish
all you nerds are eating a lot of my DAMN balls
Cue the fish that can digest plastic.
This is troubling because these substances could further bioaccumulate in people who consume fish that have eaten plastic.
This could be a disaster for the cannibals!
#DeleteChrome
From the fine article:
The next big question that it raises is whether plastic-derived contaminants can be transferred from plastic-eating fish to fish-eating humans.
If eating the plastic doesn't harm the fish, and causes no harm to the people that eat the fish, then why is this in the "health and science" section of the Washington Post? I mean, this is neat and all but is this something someone other than a biologist might find interesting?
I think that perhaps they should have held on to this until they actually figured out if the plastic eating habits actually do harm. But then again, if they saw nothing so far then haven't they already proven that if it is harmful that the harm is pretty minimal?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
of 30 years of outsourcing, automation and cheap work visas this is the least of my worries. That's sort of the problem. It's hard to get worked up about problems like this when 60-80% of us live paycheck to paycheck (depending on which study you want to believe).
If you're an environmentalist then you've got to take care of the economy first. Otherwise the vast majority of people will ignore it in favor of more pressing concerns (rent, food, etc). Does that make the working class short sighted? You damn well bet it does. It's hard not being short sighted when you live paycheck to paycheck.
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Which fish (singular) is eating plastic? Or should it be, which fishes (plural) are eating plastic?
If we stop fishing for 10 years the oceans will be pristine again.
Holy mackerel! Some people have taken the bait, but there's no way this bio-accumulation is a red herring. You can tell a whale of a lie about it if you want, but the science is clear. Most of the lies come from catfishing accounts anyway - fake! Whenever I find those I just sit on my perch and clam up so I'm not doxxed through my squid proxy. They're mental shrimps, packed into troll factories like sardines. I try not to carp on it too much. Makes me crabby.
If we learn to treat the environment better, even just for the halibut, the world will be our oyster, and we'll hum a happy tuna minute.
And millennials eat a lot of fish. Is it a coincidence that so many millennials are transgender?
Who will tell us that we need some big government regulations to solve a problem they read about in the Washington Post. Or that socialism must be implemented to save humanity. Or some other bullshit.
Authoritarians all. Might as well be feudal lords for all it matters to them. As long as they've got their boot on your neck.
Nonsense, everyone knows fish won't eat plastic. This is all some kind of liberal conspiracy to try to make us feel guilty about throwing away our garbage.
fishes are stupid!
Two birds. Fish are yucky anyway.
People looking for a healthier diet should worry about plastic in fish indeed. But here we speak about suspected problems for which we have no much data.
On the other hand, we have a lot of data about unhealthy stuff that is very common in people diets: trans fats, refined sugar, fried food. First try to reduce that, and think about plastic in fish next.
I had the chicken.
Have gnu, will travel.
In the sea, fish eat fish. On land, chicken eat chicken parts, and cow eat cow parts. So which is better?
the lives of the working class are already so hard that anything would push them over the edge. That bottle of soda, that 6 pack of beer and that microwavable lunch are the bare minimum needed to see them through the day. That's life when you're working two full time jobs to keep a roof over your head and still not making it.
If I let the environment go to hell tomorrow so I can make it through today I'm still ahead by one day. By 'everyone's' problem you mean what's left of the middle class. That's the problem. The few people that held onto a middle class life abandoned the ones that didn't. Now they're upset that those people are trashing their nice lives and nice world. I see something similar with all these pundits asking "Why are White Men so angry?". They're angry because they don't have jobs or if they do those jobs can't support a family. Now we've got thugs organizing them to march lockstep chanting about jews replacing them...
TL;DR: Abandon your working class at your peril.
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Instead of asking yourself why you're only making $13/k a year you're looking down on folks struggling at $30k. That's exactly what your supposed to be doing, if you ask the ruling class. They've got you, me and everyone in the working class fighting among ourselves.
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That's what the working class needs. Right now we're getting picked apart fighting among ourselves. We need to start guaranteeing _everyone_ a good life. The trouble is that means sometimes people who don't do any work get to live OK. And that really, really rankles about 20% of the population. We need them to get over it and fast or we're heading for a dark age.
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I hear it tastes like plastic chicken.
Table-ized A.I.
So you're going to help environmentalists take care of capitalism? It is what is directly responsible for both low wages and mass pollution.
Where does all this trash come from? Go look on google for images off trash on beaches. It's NOT the US or 1st world countries. Maybe in some minor places, but not on the whole. Check Asia, polluting there is so common place as to be shocking to true environmentalists. Clean up the 90% first instead of picking on the cleanest countries in the world.
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Oh, you're already living the dream?
I am the ruling class, and we are telling you that what you think you're suppose to be doing and what you're suppose to be doing are in your case probably opposites.
Yeah, and also we need to get them over this illusion of private property. Or personal freedom. Marxists such as yourself always think that, in a totalitarian society where people have been properly trained to think only correctly, it will be them that lead society. Guess what, it won't. After Lenin comes Stalin. And after Stalin come some little Stalins. Btw for the history impaired Stalin's profession was highway-robber. Ever think you're making things worse? Ever think why DJT was voted ? Ever think about who was considered as worse than the nazis in '30s Germany so the nazis got votes ?
Think about it this way. Several fish are on their way to extinction due to being over-fished. If we were no long able to consume many of these fish, if they find a way to thrive, they will return to previous population levels in the ocean and we won't be predators any longer which give other species opportunities. At some point either the plastic will hopefully break down and be consumed or our species will die off at which point fish will out last us. If they don't thrive, so long and thanks for all the fish.
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Data taken directly from "Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015 to 2019", right on schedule.
"If it floats it's food" is a rule that's worked well for a very long time. Maybe longer than photosynthesis.
Oysters aren't fish, they're not even vertebrates (nor chordates). And the original technical article (here: https://www.nature.com/article...) did NOT say that the oysters ate plastic, on the contrary, "The Pacific oysters came from aquaculture in urban bays and had anthropogenic debris composed entirely of fibers." (The scientists were not able to ID the fibers; could have been cotton, could have been polyester, or...) In fact, the vast majority of the "anthropogenic" materials the study found in fish caught on the west coast of the US were fibers, not (necessarily) plastic. Plastic was only common in fish bought at a market in Indonesia. (I don't know how much of the seafood we eat comes from Indonesia, nor what fish caught in other places besides Indonesia and the west coast of the US might ingest.)
That said, I do think it would be good to reduced the amount of plastic in the ocean.