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73 Percent of Fish In the Northwestern Atlantic Have Microplastics In Their Guts
According to a new study published today in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, microplastics have been found in the stomachs of nearly three out of every four mesopelagic fish caught in the Northwest Atlantic. "These findings are worrying, as the affected fish could spread microplastics throughout the ocean," reports Phys.Org. "The fish are also prey for fish eaten by humans, meaning that microplastics could indirectly contaminate our food supply through the transfer of associated microplastic toxins." From the report: Microplastics are small plastic fragments that have accumulated in the marine environment following decades of pollution. These fragments can cause significant issues for marine organisms that ingest them, including inflammation, reduced feeding and weight-loss. Microplastic contamination may also spread from organism to organism when prey is eaten by predators. Since the fragments can bind to chemical pollutants, these associated toxins could accumulate in predator species. Mesopelagic fish serve as a food source for a large variety of marine animals, including tuna, swordfish, dolphins, seals and sea birds. Typically living at depths of 200-1,000 meters, these fish swim to the surface at night to feed then return to deeper waters during the day.
The researchers caught mesopelagic fish at varying depths, then examined their stomachs for microplastics back in the lab. They used a specialized air filter so as not to introduce airborne plastic fibers from the lab environment. The team found a wide array of microplastics in the fish stomachs -- with a whopping 73% of the fish having ingested the pollutants.
The researchers caught mesopelagic fish at varying depths, then examined their stomachs for microplastics back in the lab. They used a specialized air filter so as not to introduce airborne plastic fibers from the lab environment. The team found a wide array of microplastics in the fish stomachs -- with a whopping 73% of the fish having ingested the pollutants.
And what percentage have grit in their guts? Or sand in their guts? Or bits of coral in their guts?
I can see where you're heading with this, but you haven't established anything special about microplastics in the food chain, vs other grit in the food chain. There's just nothing special about one class of inert crap, vs any other class of inert crap.
Even if you don't care about the fish, eating fish which are contaminated with micro-plastics also affects human health.
Good thing I don't eat the stomachs of fish. Now if their meat were contaminated with microplastics, then I might worry about it accumulating in my body. Some quick research suggests that microplastics bioaccumulate, as implied by the summary. What really irks me is that 'farm-raised' fish, which should theoretically be free of bioaccumulation problems present in the wild, are fed cut-up wild-caught fish, so the pollutants get fed to them anyway. Where's my grass-fed Kobe fish?!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Stop eating plastic you dumb fish
Well, I mean, plastic usually contains Bisphenol A for starters - which is a known endocrine disruptor, amongst other things. There are also a myriad of other similar chemicals in plastics which have different health effects.
Does it?
You actually need to prove that statement. I'm not saying its wrong, I actually think its probably correct, however its not science until its tested and validated a couple times.
We were lied to about the dangers of tobacco for half a century. Doctors at one time were pimping cigarettes. Millions of deaths occurred due to primary use and secondhand exposure before any tobacco company ever admitted their product was deadly.
Lies and deception surround our meat-processing industry that purposely shrouds itself in secrecy. Ever seen the inside of the processing plant where your meat comes from? Do you really know how that food source is made? I didn't think so.
I don't have to say anything beyond Medical Industrial Complex to describe how bad that multi-trillion dollar industry has become. The killer irony there is medical error is now a leading cause of death, which is conveniently excluded from death certificates.
TL; DR - Prove that statement? How about you first prove that Greed N. Corruption won't distort the truth. The "science" is far too often bought and sold these days in order to protect profits.
And does it get metabolized when in plastic? If it's just there in the plastic but completely inert there could be no health effect. How much of it do you need before it has a meaningful effect, we get trace amounts of all sorts of toxic stuff all the time. And how much of it is there in the fish? Quantity matters.
By contrast, mercury is already known to bioaccumulate in fish in sufficient quantities to have health effects on humans.
At this point, we can only speculate, but this quote from the article seems to imply to me that it shouldn't be that much of a health concern:
"As the researchers were extremely careful to exclude contamination with fibers from the air, they are confident that the fish had ingested the fibers in the sea. Finding high levels of fibers in the fish is significant, as some studies investigating microplastics in fish have dismissed such fibers as contaminants from the lab environment, meaning their role as a pollutant may have been underestimated."
If you can easily get contamination of this kind of plastic from the air in a lab, so it's probably safe to breath, and probably safe to eat.
It's like, oh we have a huge Mercury problem with fish. But haven't you heard? Mercury in fish isn't hip anymore, forget all about that, microplastics in the sea is the new hip thing!
Your statement reveals that you don't understand it all.
Let me explain it to you - micro-particles of non-digestible or difficult-to-digest stuff gives intestines more to deal with than they should otherwise.
This means they have to work harder, or work less efficiently, or the good work is overpowered by the "dealing-with-shit" stuff. This means that the organism they support doesn't reach its full potential.
TL:DR version: non-digestible input means your guts work less better. Get it?
If that's too difficult for you to cope with, then try supplementing your diet with 20% decomposed plastic bags and get back to us.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I find myself curious: where did you find the "20% decomposed plastic bags" figure? TFA only mentions that 73% of mesopelagic fish had some amount of microplastics in their stomachs, without mentioning an actual amount....
Absent a source for your number, I've got to assume you're just scaremongering (IOW you made up a scary number to try to bolster an argument - your prviliege, but I don't have to buy into your argument just because you have a scary, made-up number)....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
They examined the stomach contents of fish. Okay.
They found "microplastics" in about three out of four fish. Okay.
How much? It couldn't be a lot, because they were worried about contaminating the samples with microplastics from the air itself.
That means that the amounts they were looking for were literally microscopic, and very, very low in volume.
It's more a testament to the ability to find incredibly small amounts of the stuff than any indication that the amount they found was large.
This is a lot like the "we found Fukushima radiation in the ocean off the US coast" story - where the amount of cesium was unimaginably small - three ATOMS of the stuff per cubic meter...
The problem seem to be that those microplastic bullet are by nature accumulating some chemicals on their surface you might not want to end in fish while floating in water (there were a few article last month about that), then releasing in while in the stomach of the fish. The problem is not per see the microplastic bullet, but those "rider" chemicals...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Hmmmm... In the internet craze known as the Tide Pod challenge, Teenagers are ingesting laundry detergent and plastic, yet all the focus is on eating the detergent.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
And North Korea is actually called Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Doesn't make it so.
Scientific method or faith. Those are your options. If the plastic is harmful surely there are tons of scientific tests and journals detailing the harm?
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i am pure veg
Seriously? Sure, we did some crazy and - in retrospect - stupid things in my days, but nothing at these levels of stupidity and pointlessness.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Did you read the summary? Not only do the plastics bind to chemical pollutants, the stomachs or the fish get full of plastic leading to reduced feeding. Both those things will lead to lower lifespans and likely, reduced reproduction rates. When you consider bio accumulation as you work up the food chain, it just makes life even harder for animals like tuna and dolphins.
Over long time scales, this will work itself out, but who knows how long that will take and how species will be impacted by the time they evolve around this.
TL; DR - Prove that statement? How about you first prove that Greed N. Corruption won't distort the truth. The "science" is far too often bought and sold these days in order to protect profits.
Sometimes, it's merely self-righteousness and stupidity. During the American Prohibition period, a plasticizer was added to Jamaican ginger (Jake) to foil inspectors testing for ginger solids meant to make the alcohol unpalatable.
A pair of amateur chemists and bootleggers, Harry Gross and Max Reisman, worked to develop an alternative adulterant that would pass the tests, but still be somewhat palatable. They sought advice from a professor at MIT who did not realize it was meant for internal consumption. They settled on a plasticizer, tri-o-tolyl phosphate (also known as tri-ortho cresyl phosphate, TOCP, or Tricresyl phosphate), that was able to pass the Treasury Department's tests but preserved Jake's drinkability. TOCP was originally thought to be non-toxic; however, it was later determined to be a neurotoxin that causes axonal damage to the nerve cells in the nervous system of human beings, especially those located in the spinal cord. The resulting type of paralysis is now referred to as organophosphate-induced delayed neuropathy, or OPIDN.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
By George Carlin:
The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic.
The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allows us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question, “Why are we here?” “Plastic, assholes.”
Right now, fish that are not farmed are advertised as "wild caught" because, you know, that sounds better. The term makes us think of pristine Alaskan streams. If farmed fish raised in filtered water canbe advertised as "plastic free," this will flip.
You don't get it ? Every piece of microsplastic you eat, could kill you
Do these microplastics affect the fish's health and / or significantly impact their lifespan? If not then is there some other reason to be concerned?
Well, the problem is with science itself. Or rather with the way science is covered in the media. The media wants answers, but the first step in science is finding good questions. You can't answer a question like that until you know the phenomenon exists, but people want to jump straight to what it means.
If there were one thing I wish the educational system instilled in people, it would be the capacity of being concerned without necessarily being alarmed. People come out with basically two easy options to fall back on: alarmism and denialism.
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So you can't provide any links?
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So you can't provide any links either?
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I predict this will be the response after reading followup studies on ocean health.
plastic usually contains Bisphenol A
Most plastic does not contain bisphenol-A. BPA is used in epoxy resins and in polycarbonate, which are together less than 2% of plastic production. It is not normally used in other plastics.
The most common plastic in the ocean is polyethylene, which is inert and basically harmless.
Theoretically sand doesn't leech dioxins into the fish's body. That's been mentioned in OP and TFA. You're the one claiming that plastic is inert, and I'd be interested in how you came to that conclusion.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
LDPE is like a sponge and it absorbs lots of other crap as it floats around for years in the ocean. Crap that you don't want in a fish's belly, but even uncontaminated PE can be problematic for a fish.
Saying PE is basically harmless is an over simplification and really only applies to normal uses of the material. There are exceptional cases where it can cause harm. It's the business of researchers to look at exceptional cases and see how our assumptions match up to reality.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If that's too difficult for you to cope with, then try supplementing your diet with 20% decomposed plastic bags and get back to us.
It would be a new data point for science. So please proceed.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Father owns a fishing business in a classic New England fishing town.
The size of his catch each year since 1980 has been the same size. The average fish size (which he keeps track of) has a plus/minus deviation of about a quarter kilo each year. That's 150 tons each haul.
More alarmist bullshite, just like the Mercury claims to try and clamp down on an otherwise very healthy blue collar trade.
Every waste known to man, including nuclear, could be in the ocean.
Or in the air! hold your breath.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
OK, why don't you eat some microplastic with every meal for a few months and then let us know how you are doing?
Then it will have been tested.
What's that you say? You don't want to eat microplastic? But that's very irrational: it hasn't been conclusively proved to be harmful.
In fact, you may have unwittingly opened up a gigantic new field of research. For instance, AFAIK it has never been scientifically proved that eating ground glass is harmful to humans. Nor dropping them off skyscrapers... Just think of the potential for new knowledge.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
TL:DR version: non-digestible input means your guts work less better. Get it?
If that's too difficult for you to cope with, then try supplementing your diet with 20% decomposed plastic bags and get back to us.
Um. If something is non-digestible, doesn't that mean you just shit it out? If you can't digest it, it just passes through. Much like when you feed corn to dogs. They can't digest corn, so it comes out looking much the way it did going in, yellow kernels, unaffected by digestion.
Also, I'd like to point out, if it can't be digested and somehow remains lodged in the gut, that wouldn't affect the parts we'd be interested in for eating. We don't eat the entrails. Now I suppose there is the matter of it somehow becoming stuck within the digestive system, but I haven't seen anything like that mentioned. Why would it get stuck in there? You'd think, as I already said, it'd just pass through like any other non-digestible matter.
This is not new info. Plastics pass through wastewater treatment plants and plastic left on beaches or or bays get into the oceans. Fish see this waste as food and eat it.
"eating fish which are contaminated with micro-plastics"
Eating fish gut isn't a common event for me. Now, fish meal is a problem, but so far as I know I don't get that in my diet either.
Do I now avoid buying fish based food for my dog? Maybe not. He's a dog.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
TL:DR should really go at the start as it's a summary, rather like an abstract... not to difficult to understand eh?
As for the plastics, as another poster pointed out, the fish will just shit it out.
Does it go on forever?
Oh please. 'My argument' hardly hinged on that one statement, so it's hard to characterize it as 'extremely weak'.
I'll concede that 'stomach fullness' apparently isn't an issue, but, from the paper:
"Microplastics have previously been shown to adversely impact invertebrate species such as lugworms, causing weight loss, reduced feeding activity and inflammation (Besseling et al., 2013; Wright et al., 2013), and detrimental effects on the intestinal functioning of seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax) have also been noticed (Pedà et al., 2016)."
And
"The ingestion of microplastics by mesopelagic fish may also have secondary implications for other species as well as the entire ecosystem. Mesopelagic fish are now known to make up a substantial biomass in the pelagic realm (Kaartvedt et al., 2012) and provide an important food source for many large predators such as dolphins, seals, and tuna as well as sea birds (Cherel et al., 2008; Danielsen et al., 2010; Spitz et al., 2010; Varela et al., 2013). These taxa consume large amounts of mesopelagic fish and consequently ingest the microplastics within them. More importantly, due to trophic transfer, predators of mesopelagic fish may also bioaccumulate chemical pollutants absorbed from ingested microplastics."
So, if we go back to the original question being asked—"do these microplastics affect the fishes' health"—the answer is almost certainly yes.