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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.
> 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.
Well, I eat Twizzlers, kind of the same thing.
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
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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Perhaps he's creating a replacement for systemd. We can hope, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Look at you jiggling in your overstressed office chair because you thought you found an error in someone else's grammar, askance.
"Fish" is a collective noun, you nitwit. Fish as a concept. You can't count them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You dunce.
âoeFishâ is a perfectly acceptable plural. Itâ(TM)s even in the dictionary.
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.
Thus your question is based on a false assumption.
Yes, how dare there be regulations to prevent build up of plastics in ecosystems, and ultimately in human stomachs. What a crime. People should be free to pollute, because that's their Invisible Hand-given right, and anyone who says otherwise is a filthy Communist.
Now excuse me, there's a metric tonne of rotting fish guts I need to drop adjacent to a certain AC's property, because the Invisible Hand says it's fine to make other peoples' lives unhealthy, and there's nothing they should ever be allowed to do about it, except die quietly.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A fish will eat whatever can fit into its mouth.
Grow up, asshole.
Yeah, I'll be mature like you from now on.
the correct word is "fishes.
If this were a biology website. As it is, the headline is correct.
If only you could lose weight as easily as you lose arguments, huh Heavy Chris?
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.
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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Or cue the devastation when they don't.
...packed into troll factories like sardines...
Jeez I hope that's not in plastic packaging.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
There's also the issue of biomagnification--bioaccumulation moving up the food chain.
Small fish consume small amounts of plastic.
Larger fish consume many small fish over time, consuming (and accumulating) larger and larger amounts of plastic.
Higher-level predators--Dolphins, polar bears, whales, people--eat these larger fish, accumulating even more plastic.
The small fish may never consume enough plastic for it to be a huge deal, but it might be a really big deal for the polar bear.
Mercury is one of the classic examples of an element that disproportionately affects the higher levels of the food chain.
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.
I have always been a little leery of eating fish. Whatever is in the water, is in the fish. Plastic is actually the least of my worries.
So you're going to help environmentalists take care of capitalism? It is what is directly responsible for both low wages and mass pollution.
Post to undo moderation error.
Sort of like you, creimer?
Actually, i digestible plastic may be a good strategy for you to not exceed that 1500 calorie per day target! Consider it!
Two stones, actually.
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?
As others have already pointed out, plastic does harm the fish, even if it doesn't kill them outright. Not only does a lot of the plastic come as very small fragments, which may well pass into the bloodstream, but they also give off harmful chemicals. Since much of the plastic debris in the ocean has been floating around for decades, part of it will contain chemicals that are now banned. The problem of accumulation is exacerbated by the fact that many of the fish we eat, have eaten smaller, that have eaten something even smaller and so on; and on top of that, we catch a huge amount of fish that go directly into animal feed, so even if you never touch fish, you are still likely to be affected. Bon appetit.
Yes, if fish have the same evolutionary speed than E. coli, we can expect fish to digest plastic correctly within 30,000 to 35,000 generations. It's just about to happen! Wait and see!
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?
From the fine article:
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.
I know this was buried way deep into the article on the second paragraph, but obviously you didn't get that far.
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.
Place something witty here
It would be more likely for a fish to form a symbiotic relationship with one of the microbes that can already digest plastics. Lots of bacteria in the human digestive tract, for example.
"If it floats it's food" is a rule that's worked well for a very long time. Maybe longer than photosynthesis.
So, why would fish be any different?
As a tropical fish owner, fish refers to one specie and fishes refer to many species.
"A fish will eat whatever can fit into its mouth." Sounds more like humans to me. Just add "fried" to it.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
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.