Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr;

Author:Ferris Jabr; [Jabr, Ferris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2024-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

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In the past three billion years, the Earth system has confronted and assimilated life’s problematic waste products many times. Might it do the same now? Will living organisms and the ecosystems they share adapt to humanity’s deluge of plastic?

To some extent, they already are. Hundreds if not thousands of species spend at least part of their life cycles floating atop the ocean’s surface or drifting just beneath it. Much like plastic debris, such organisms are subject to the currents and are often concentrated in the same parts of the sea. For these creatures, plastics have become both a burden and an opportunity. When scientists used nets to filter seawater throughout the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they discovered a massive floating ecosystem composed of fish, snails, slugs, crustaceans, and various gelatinous organisms living in some of the highest densities ever recorded. For many of these organisms, plastic is a physical impediment and a toxic pollutant, but for some, plastic can also be a lifeboat or even a home.

The influx of durable floating plastic waste to the ocean is tantamount to the sudden introduction of an immense new habitat where typically coastal species can form self-sustaining communities on the open sea. Scientists have known for centuries that living creatures sometimes reach new territory by rafting across the ocean on wood, seaweed, pumice, and other flotsam. Plastics have dramatically expanded the range and duration of such voyages. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami produced the largest rafting event on record. Following the disaster, researchers discovered that hundreds of species from coastal Japan—including anemones, sponges, and crustaceans—had traveled more than 3,700 miles across the Pacific, primarily by riding on plastic debris. Many of these plastic-bound creatures survived and reproduced in the open ocean for years, eventually arriving on the shores of the Hawaiian Islands and the western coast of North America.

Microorganisms living on mats of floating plastic may also find themselves at an advantage compared to their free-swimming peers because they can more easily feed on each other and one another’s byproducts. The biological films that develop on plastic trap potentially nutritious particles, and plastics themselves can be a source of sustenance for microbes that manage to break their tenacious molecular bonds. Some evidence suggests that, over the past seven decades, numerous species have been evolving to do just that. As early as the 1970s, scientists discovered fungi that could break down polyester and bacteria that could digest some of the molecular building blocks of nylon. As of 2020, researchers have documented more than 430 species that can digest various forms of plastic. Most are bacteria or fungi, but there are also some insect larvae in this growing group of plastivores.

In the mid-2010s, a team of scientists in Japan led by microbiologist Kohei Oda collected 250 samples of sediment, soil, wastewater, and activated sludge from a plastic bottle recycling site in Osaka. All of the environmental samples were from areas that had been thoroughly contaminated with polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the main plastic used to make drink bottles.

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