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Microplastics Can Spread Via Flying Insects, Research Shows (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microplastic can escape from polluted waters via flying insects, new research has revealed, contaminating new environments and threatening birds and other creatures that eat the insects. Scientists fed microplastics to mosquito larvae, which live in water, but found that the particles remained inside the animals as they transformed into flying adults. Other recent research found that half of the mayfly and caddisfly larvae in rivers in Wales contained microplastics. The new study, published in the journal Biology Letters, used Culex pipiens mosquitoes, as they are found across the world in many habitats. The researchers found the larvae readily consumed fluorescent microplastic particles that were 0.0002cm in size. The larvae matured into a non-feeding pupa stage and then emerged as adult mosquitoes, which still had significant microplastic within them. The researchers are now studying if this damages the mosquitoes. Professor Amanda Callaghan, at the University of Reading, UK, says it is "highly likely" that other flying insects that begin as water larvae will also eat and retain microplastics. Furthermore, animals that feed on insects, like birds, bats, and spiders, are likely also consuming microplastics.
And Ozzy Osbourne eats bats, so he is consuming plastic too. Nobody eat Ozzy Osbourne, or you're just making the problem worse.
Between this and global warming, I'm pretty sure that there will not be a planet Earth in 50 years from now.
Earth will be a giant ball of plastic.
What if all this is planned? What if the blackhole at the centre of our galaxy is a cosmic-sized amazon package and all the stars orbiting it are just cosmic-sized packing peanuts.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are! We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. 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 toward 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 allowed 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 egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic asshole. - George Carlin https://www.goodreads.com/quot...
how plastic flowers are pollinated
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I do not eat insects. No bird we commonly eat eats insects either. My cat is too lazy to hunt birds these days. Thus -- mosquitoes having health problems? What's the downside?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.