China fires missile into the South Pacific. Provocation? Islanders are concerned.

China just launched a nuclear-capable ballistic missile smack into the central South Pacific, without bothering to notify the target country.

What the heck could that mean?

The rocket didn’t come near Hawai’i. It was at little over 2,000 miles south. 

But that rocket flew some 7,000 miles from China to its watery landing spot. The distance from Beijing to Hawaii is just 5,000. Beijing to San Francisco is 6,000.

Was the Sept. 25, 2024, missile a message, or, as China suggests, just a routine test? Not routine, certainly, since China hasn’t done anything like this in more than 40 years.

Hawai’i folks have expressed concern about North Korean rockets gaining the capacity to fly as far as the Hawaiian archipelago, but China has long had that capacity, and it demonstrated that with the Sept. 25 launch, which reportedly terminated within the exclusive economic zone of Kiribati, near Caroline Island.

Caroline is an uninhabited atoll south of the Equator, in the Southern Line Islands. French Polynesia is to the south and east of it. The Cook Islands are to the west. U.S.-controlled Jarvis and Palmyra are to the north.

China warned the United States and Russia of the proposed launch, which is required by treaty, but did not bother notifying the target nation, Kiribati. France, New Zealand and Australia also got notice. Japan and French Polynesia did not.

China reported the missile carried a dummy warhead.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that China has three models of nuclear-weapon-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as Dongfeng, or East Wind. They are the DF-5, DF-31 and DF-41. Sources differed over whether the Sept. 25 missile was a DF31 or 41.

All three of the missiles have the range to reach either Hawai’i or the West Coast. The DF-5 is silo-based while the other two are transported on mobile carriers, some of which are off-road-capable.

The nation of Kiribati, which has benefitted from Chinese investment in recent years, expressed concern about the launch of a military rocket into its waters. 

French Pacific waters are just south of the rocket landing zone, and officials in Papeete also expressed concern. Radio New Zealand reports that China threw a dinner party in French Polynesia to calm the waters.

The international only news magazine The Diplomat suggested the launch was hardly “routine,” as China suggested. It was the first Chinese launch into international waters since 1980—more than four decades.

That doesn’t mean it was provocative. “Beijing’s motivation for this test launch might not have been the desire to send a political signal, but rather a need for technical data,” The Diplomat wrote.

That said, officials of numerous of the nations of the Pacific have expressed concern. China has been actively courting Pacific nations on the trade front, but until now, it has not suggested that it carries a big stick behind the open pocketbook.

Wrote The Diplomat: 

“China has made progress in winning over some of the Pacific Island states, but has run into resistance from others that fear turning the region into an arena of China-U.S. strategic competition. Firing a nuclear-capable missile into the midst of the islands not only stokes that fear, it positions China as an aggressor.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

The international enigma, a baffling sphere on Japan beach, would be no mystery to Hawai'i beachgoers

(Image: Fuji News Network image of the globally baffling sphere on Hamamatsu City beach.)

A UFO. A dragon egg. A communist plot. Another spy balloon.

Wow.

International media report they’re baffled by a mysterious metal sphere that washed up on a Japan beach.

It wouldn’t be baffling to any Hawai’i beachgoer, because we see them all the time. They wash up regularly, sometimes painted orange or yellow, but most often covered with brown-red rust. Big, hollow (or occasionally foam-filled) steel spheres used in various maritime activities.

The sphere in question, 4-5 feet in diameter, washed up on a long stretch of sand off Hamamatsu City. It caused great consternation, locally and internationally. It was isolated with yellow caution tape. Authorities subjected it to tests to determine it was empty. Eventually they hauled it off the beach and disposed of it.

And international media had fun with it. Perhaps because, after the Chinese balloon and the “pico” balloons shot down over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron, we were primed for stories about weird round things.

The Guardian breathlessly wondered whether it was a “Spy Balloon, UFO or Dragon Ball” or maybe even a stray mine. 

Nope.

The BBC called it a “mystery sphere” and said Japan was perplexed, with some folks calling it a “Godzilla egg.” 

Oh my. But, nope.

The British media network Unilad suggested some folks thought it was a devious device sent by China or North Korea. 

Uh, uh.

The India Times reported that February 23, 2023, Japanese authorities confirmed it was “marine equipment” that had washed ashore. 

They wash up periodically on Hawaiian beaches, too. They are industrial buoys, used by maritime industries for various purposes. One popular purpose in Hawai’i is as floats for FADs or fish aggregating devices. They are also used as moorings for ships, with one end chained to an anchor and the other tied to the boat. They are sometimes used to support oceanographic monitoring equipment.

And occasionally they break free and end up as marine debris on beaches.

You can buy them. 

And they don’t always come as spheres. 

Many, like the Hamamatsu City sphere, have connection points at both ends. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023

Plastic pollution is inescapable, and it contributed to the death of our sperm whale

 

(Images--above and at bottom--of marine debris from sperm whale belly, courtesy UH Health and Stranding Lab.)

If you’re a fish or a turtle or most any kind of marine life feeding in the Pacific, it’s hard to avoid the plastic.

Almost all of the sea’s creatures end up ingesting some of it, and that includes the massive (56 feet, 50ish tons) sperm whale that washed up at Lydgate Park last week.

The Ocean Cleanup estimates 5 trillion bits of plastic in the ocean. 

And 1.8 trillion bits in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that vast gyre that runs roughly between Hawai’i and the Aleutians and California. 

The World Economic Forum estimates the ocean has 75 to 199 million tons of plastic. 

So if a critter opens its mouth to take a bite of food, it’s hard to miss getting some plastic as well.

And they do.

There are microplastics in squid. 

Plastics in all species of marine turtles. 

Plastics in tuna, including canned tuna meat. 

Plastics in many kinds of seabirds. 

The Maritime Aquarium in Connecticut estimates that by 2050, the way we’re going, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.  

So, no surprise when an adult sperm whale washed ashore dead last week, it had a bellyful. Of plastic.

“A major finding was the number of manufactured items in the whale’s stomach,” said Dr. Kristi West, director of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Health and Stranding Lab. It could have been enough plastic to cause a blockage, and could have contributed to the whale’s death, West said.

In addition to squid beaks and fish skeletons and other natural food remains, they found chunks of plastic netting, plastic bags, bits of rope, monofilament fishing line, a fishing net float, and several of the odd cone-shaped black plastic devices that are the doors to hagfish traps.

This is shocking, but it isn’t news. Whales of many species, including sperm whales, have been stranding all around the world with plastic in their guts. And the filter-feeding Humpback whales that seasonally slap and leap around Hawai'i are not exempt, although they tend to ingest tinier bits of plastic. 

The study into the cause of the Lydgate  whale’s death will continue with laboratory analysis of organ and other body parts, and it may be a long time before a firm cause of its demise is established, if it is.

And as for the plastics, where does it all come from? Certainly a lot from fishing operations—some of the ropes, and monofilament, and nets, and hagfish traps and plastic floats. But it’s estimated far more comes from the land—blowing off the shore, sluicing down storm drains and, the biggest source, washing down big rivers.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023

 

Why did the sperm whale die? That's not yet clear, but myriad possibilities

 It will likely be weeks or longer before we know why a big sperm whale washed ashore on Kauai, or we may never know.

Some folks have already been suggesting theories, but without doing the science, it’s guesswork.

There are many known causes of sperm whale strandings—many natural and some involving human activities.

Veterinarians and other wildlife experts are doing the hard work to conduct a necropsy on the more than 50-foot sperm whale that washed up at Lydgate Beach Park in Wailua, Kaua’i, on the morning of January 28.

But let’s look at some of the possibilities.

Whales do get old and die. They get viruses and other diseases. They can be affected by parasites. There is some evidence that climate change can impact navigation and food availability. They can be injured by natural (think big sharks) or human (think container ship impacts) causes. Noise can disorient them, and that noise can be from natural causes like undersea earthquakes, or human causes like deep sea mining exploration, sonar and noisy big ships.

The options really are too numerous for guesses to be taken seriously. Some recent strandings have had various causes.

One sperm whale that beached in the Florida Keys last year was very thin. On investigation, it had ingested marine debris, which had interfered with its ability to feed.

A 30-foot sperm whale that washed up this month in Oregon had injuries consistent with being hit by a ship.

This 2018 study suggests that some North Sea strandings may simply have been because the healthy but young sperm whales inadvertently swam into shallow water and couldn’t get back into the deep. 

Sperm whales, like many others, can become engangled in marine debris like ropes and buoys, and can be weakened by having to drag all that weight. Entanglement in fishing gear like buoys can make it difficult for whales to submerge for feeding.

This 2005 study and this 2009 study suggested that sunspot activity and even changes in the Earth’s magnetic field could impact sperm whale stranding. 

As we reported recently at Raising Islands, roughly half of recent stranded whales of various were associated with a newly described virus. 

In some cases, there are multiple things going on, such as skin disease, liver disease, parasites, viral infections, bacterial infections, fungal infections, high concentrations in blubber of man-made chemicals like pesticides and PCBs, and having ingested plastic while feeding. In many cases, it is not possible to determine which, if any, of these was the cause of the stranding.

And then there is the whole issue of climate change, which can impact marine life in numerous ways, including forcing animals into unfamiliar feeding territories, impacting feeding for juvenile animals, and much more. This Australian study from 2013 suggested: “Reductions in the extent of key habitats, changes in breeding success, a greater incidence of strandings in dugongs and cetaceans, and increased exposure of coastal species to pollutants and pathogens are likely.” 

In one month last year, 17 whales of several different species stranded off Norway. The cause is not known, and as the authors of this paper wrote, “Whale strandings are common globally, although to date there are still many challenges in identifying their cause.” 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2023

Random climate science: Hot seas, marine debris, changing forests and, of course, goats

They've been taking temperature measurements at San Diego's Scripps Pier for 102 years.

And on Aug. 1, 2018, they measured the highest temperature in all that time: 78.6 degrees. And summer's not even over yet. 

The same day, a half-mile offshore they measured 79.7 degrees, second highest at that location after a 2015 El Nino year measurement. 

Yeah, that's just one location, and you can get isolated peak temperatures, but large scale temperature data continue to move in one direction. The image at upper right represents global land and sea temperatures from 1880 to 2015. It comes from the National Climate Data Center.

There are still plenty of skeptics out there, but the science seems clear.

We all know about rising sea levels, California wildfires, increasing droughts, acidification of the oceans and so on. But what are some of the likely impacts that we don't hear much about?

For the Hawaiian and Pacific Islands, a warming climate has other kinds of implications. Marine debris, for example, can not only be a nuisance, an entanglement threat to turtles, an ingestion threat to seabirds, but a bunch of other things.

Climate change can alter storm frequency, change current patterns, and move plastic debris into new parts of the sea and the coast, according to a study in the journal Aquatic Invasions.  

"Climate change may also increase the frequency and magnitude of storm activity capable of washing the immense amounts of plastic material now poised on the edges of the world’s coastlines into the sea," the authors write.

Have a child interested in medical school? Suggest a career in treating parasitic worms. There's evidence that a warming climate will increase the populations and virulence in a range of nasty bugs that like to bore into human tissue.

In the PLOS journal Neglected Tropical Diseases, there's this paper: " Global 'worming': Climate change and its projected general impact on human helminth infections." 

Not every nasty parasite will increase but many will, and some of those will be able to move into areas where they now don’t exist. And here's a word to get familiar with: ancylostomiasis. It is caused by a hookworm and can cause anemia in humans. Here's another: ascariasis, a disease caused by a roundworm. Both are expected to thrive in a warming climate.

There are a lot of folks in the Midwest who have felt secure that climate change will impact them minimally, since, after all, they aren't going to be impacted by rising seas or tropical storm systems. But there's increasing evidence that they can expect disruptions, too.

The Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment suggests that the growing season will be longer, but that with more spring floods and summer drought, the state might not be able to take advantage of it. 

And not just Indiana. 

Northern European forests will see big species changes, with declines in species like silver fir, beech, common ash and common oak, and a better habitat for alien species like the Douglas fir, red oak and black locust. With the change in species will come a dramatic change in the natural species that rely on those forests, said a paper in the journal Global Change Biology called "How much does climate change threaten European forest tree species distributions?" 

Should you get used to goat-milk ice cream? One research paper suggests that in a more extreme environment, goats present the best option for milk and meat. 

"Goats have numerous advantages that enable them to maintain their production under extreme climate conditions. Principally, goats have higher capacity than other farm raised ruminants to effectively convert some feed sources into milk and meat," write authors Nazan Koluman Darcana and Nissim Silanikoveb in the journal Small Ruminant Research.

Additionally, they produce less methane than cattle, they write.

©Jan TenBruggencate 2018

Vampire Mice II: Mice changing diet, growing bigger as they attack giant seabirds

 Laysan albatross with mouse injury. Credit: USFWS.

Like characters in some horror movie, house mice are moving up the food chain and getting bigger.

They’re feeding on chicks and now adult seabirds, leaving hundreds of three-foot-tall albatrosses bleeding from their necks, heads and backs, like victims in a vampire flick.

In one case, they are also changing in size—nearly doubling in mass on one Atlantic island where they aggressively eat seabird chicks.

The lowly mouse, Mus musculus, has always been an omnivore, but they’ve never had the reputation of rats as attack rodents. That is changing on islands around the world.

The latest spooky change in their level of aggression came on  a remote Hawaiian Island: Sand Island at Midway Atoll at the remote western end of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which takes up all of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and considerable square mileage of the surrounding waters.

On Midway, mice are biting the necks of adult Laysan albatross, chewing down skin and fat and muscle, and drinking blood.  Hundreds of the big birds have been found dead, and more hundreds of abandoned nests suggest other injured parent birds may have died at sea.

Night video of the nesting areas show the tiny gray mice climbing the backs and necks of the albatrosses, repeatedly sipping at gaping wounds they have chewed into the birds’ bodies.

Mice going after big adult birds at Midway started out of the blue in 2015, and this was new. This was another step, something not seen before anywhere. Wildlife officials are now studying ways to wipe out the mouse population, before the predation gets worse.

We wrote about this at Raising Islands here. 

Efforts to control predation on important seabird nesting islands has previously mainly focused on rats—mainly Pacific rats and black rats, which are also known as roof rats and ship rats. But in the past two decades, mice have stepped up as serious predators of seabirds.

Mice have been caught attacking soft chicks and eggs on bird nesting islands for some time. Here is a Live Science piece on attacks at other islands. 

On Gough Island in the South Atlantic, game cameras recorded swarms of mice attacking nestlings of Tristan albatross (Diomedia dabbenena,) great puffins (Puffinus gravis) and Atlantic petrel (Pterodoma incerta.)

“One video showed up to 10 mice mauling an albatross chick and eating from three open wounds on its body,” wrote Live Science writer Jeanna Byer in 2007.

Puffins and petrels are smaller seabirds, the size of mynah birds or pigeons. Albatrosses, which can be three feet tall with wingspans of six to 11 feet, are huge.  A mouse standing up might reach four inches in height. In climbing an albatross, they are climbing a bird nine times taller than they are.

The authors of a 2012 scientific paper in Animal Conservation on that situation wrote: “mice cannot be ignored as a potential threat to island fauna, and island restoration and management plans should routinely include eradication of introduced mice.” 

Injured albatross at Midway in colony. Credit; USFWS.

A 2016 piece in Smithsonian suggests that mice, fed on a rich diet of seabird flesh, are actually changing in size—getting huge. 

They are nearly twice the weight of standard house mice. The standard house mouse is tiny, weighing only about 16 to 25 grams. On Gough, the average mouse runs more than 35 grams.

“They’re the largest and heaviest mice anywhere in the world,” said Richard Cuthbert of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Cuthbert was the lead author of a 2016  Journal of Mammalogy  article that suggested that the bird diet is a primary cause of the change in mouse size. 

Of course it is not only adult birds that mice attack when they get established on islands. 

Wildlife officials in New Zealand have noted mice killing not only seabird chicks but native lizards, seedlings and bird eggs. New Zealand has removed rats and mice from several offshore islands.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018

Hawaiian shearwaters have a bellyful of plastic marine debris

Not just seabirds: An entangled Hawaiian monk seal.  Credit: NOAA.

Laysan albatross chicks have been found dead with their bellies stuffed with bits of plastic, and a new study shows that Kaua`i-based Newell’s and wedge-tailed shearwaters face similar threats.

Worse, the amount of plastic found in the seabirds is increasing over time.

“On Kaua‘i…50.0 % of Newell’s…and 76.9 % of wedge-tailed shearwater … fledglings necropsied during 2007–2014 contained plastic items in their digestive tract, while 42.1 % of adult wedge-tailed shearwaters had ingested plastic'

That is one conclusion of the paper, “Plastic ingestion by Newell’s (Puffinus newelli) and wedge-tailed shearwaters (Ardenna pacifica) in Hawaii.” It was published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution  Research by Elizabeth C. Kain, Jennifer L. Lavers, Carl J. Berg, Alexander L. Bond and André F. Raine. 

The researchers also found that “For both species, the frequency of plastic ingestion has increased since the 1980s with some evidence that the mass and the number of items ingested per bird have also increased.”

In fact, hundreds of marine species are threatened by plastic, which can mimic natural food sources, or be mistaken for food by seabirds, turtles, squids, fish, oysters, seals and others. 

The researchers in this paper looked at the stomach contents of seabirds killed by predators or collisions in the 2013-2014 nesting season. The results were compared with a study done in the 1987 season on Kauai, when 11 percent of the birds were found to have eaten plastics. For Newell’s shearwaters, that represents nearly a five-fold increase over  a quarter century.

In both the Newell’s, a mountain-nesting bird, and the wedge-tailed shearwaters, which nest near the shore, the predominant color of ingested plastic was white.

Both adults and fledglings had plastic in their guts. Since fledglings receive all their food regurgitated by their parents, the parents are presumed to have been delivering plastic-laced meals to their young.

“Plastic ingested by seabirds has been shown to block and take up space in the digestive tract, contributing to dehydration and in some cases starvation,” the authors wrote.

There is also suggestion in the scientific literature that the plastic can release chemical pollutants into the bodies of the birds, they said.

“The amount of plastic in the oceans is increasing and poses an increased risk of entanglement, ingestion, and thus morbidity and mortality for marine life,” the authors wrote.

National Geographic last year had a story that suggested that every seabird on the planet has or shortly will have a plastic ingestion issue.

That story references this study, which makes the point that “this threat is geographically widespread, pervasive, and rapidly increasing.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2016

Delisting Hawai`i's humpbacks--when are there enough of them?

The federal government has proposed delisting the Hawaiian humpback whale from endangered status, and the move has much of the marine environmental community in an uproar of opposition.

But this has been a long time coming. 

(Image: Humpbacks in Hawaiian waters. Credit: Lou Herman/NOAA.)

NOAA started reviewing the listing status of humpbacks in 2009. In 2013, the Hawaii Fishermen's Alliance for Conservation and Tradition called for delisting, and last year, the State of Alaska called for delisting of the central North Pacific whale population.

 

“After reviewing the petitions, the literature cited in the petitions, and other literature and information available in our files, we found that both petitioned actions may be warranted,” the agency said.

NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service announced: “We … have completed a comprehensive status review of the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) under the Endangered Species … and announce a proposal to revise the listing status of the species.”

NOAA will publish in tomorrow’s (4/21/15) Congressional Register its proposal to consider 14 populations for humpbacks and to delist 10 of them, including the population that comes to Hawai`i. (Two populations would remain endangered and two would be recategorized threatened.)

The four populations still in trouble are the Arabian Sea and Cape Verde Islands/Northwest Africa populations, as well as the Western North Pacific and Central America populations. 

But the agency concluded that: “the West Indies, Hawaii, Mexico, Brazil, Gabon/Southwest Africa, Southeast Africa/Madagascar, West Australia, East Australia, Oceania, and Southeastern Pacific DPSs are not in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of their ranges or likely to become so in the foreseeable future.” (DPS is the acronym for distinct population segment.)

The reasons for proposed delisting: Humpack whales have recovered strongly since whaling for them was largely stopped half a century ago, and since they were granted Endangered Species Act protection. 

NOAA found that the Hawaiian population, which winters in the Islands and summers in cooler waters near Alaska, is genetically distinct from other Pacific populations and seldom moves between populations.

Their population has jumped many times its pre-protection level. The population is estimated at 12,000 individual whales, and is believed increasing at 5.5 to 6 percent each year. They are so common today that boaters sometimes have difficulty avoiding running into them in Hawai`i. 

“Reports of vessel collisions in Hawaii have increased since 2003 … Numerous collisions have also been reported from Alaska and British Columbia,” the NOAA report says.

The facts seem clear, but any time the government proposes delisting species, there’s an uproar. The Mainland U.S. has seen angry debates over the proposed delisting of the wolf. And Hawai’i residents are currently debating suggestions that the green sea turtle be delisted.

The Pacific Whale Foundation lists three reasons for its opposition to delisting:

“Lack of sufficient pre-exploitation population estimates for North Pacific populations of humpback whale; Poor understanding of the relationship between humpback whale stocks within the North Pacific; An inadequate evaluation of threats to humpback whales in the North Pacific, including entanglement in fishing gear, underwater noise pollution, ocean acidification, habitat loss and destruction, ship strikes, loss of prey, ecosystem changes and climate change.”

The Center for Biological Diversity also cited climate change and ocean acidification for its opposition. 

Of course, every creature in the sea is at risk from climate change and ocean acidification, and many species are impacted by marine debris and other human activities in the oceans. A reasonable question seems to be, given large and increasing populations, what justification would keep an animal on the endangered species list.

A Honolulu public hearing on the issue will be held, and electronic comments on the proposed delisting will be received for 90 days. NOAA’s webpage on the whales is here.

It is notable that the report assumes the continuation of the protection for whales in Hawai`i under the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, either in that form, or as an ecosystem-based sanctuary, as proposed under a new draft management plan. 

The sanctuary is accepting comments through June 19 on that plan.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Baby sea turtle mystery partly solved: they're independent swimmers not drifters

A great mystery of the marine world—what green sea turtles do as keiki—has partly been solved.

Researchers caught yearling turtles and attached tags that would slough off after a couple of months. 

They found the young turtles aren’t just drifting around—they’re actively swimming. Which is interesting, because nobody's been able to prove this before, and it contradicts conventional wisdom.

(Image: When buoys and tagged turtles were placed in the water together, they went different ways. Here, two blue lines track the buoys, and the green is the track of one of the turtles followed in this study. Credit: NOAA Fisheries.)

Nathan Putman and Katherine Mansfield published their results in the journal Current Biology. Their tagging included the green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas, which is the dominant nearshore turtle found in the Hawaiian Islands, as well as Kemp's ridley turtles.

The first couple of years of most turtle species' lives are sometimes called the “lost years.” The keiki hatch on beaches, scramble into the sea, and then disappear until they come back to they show up again as much larger animals.

“It has been widely assumed that turtles simply drift with ocean current,” says a NOAA press release on the study.

Putman, a sea turtle biologist with NOAA's Southeast Fisheries Science Center, and Mansfield, director of the University of Central Florida's Marine Turtle Research Group, set out to find out for sure.

Mansfield put solar-powered satellite tags on 44 wild-caught young turtles, and at the same time deployed drifting satellite buoys that would follow the currents. If the turtles and the buoys went the same places, then it would suggest the turtles simply followed the currents.

But they didn’t.

Within the first few days, some of the turtles were already 125 miles from the buoys. The young turtles were actively swimming and navigating independent of current flow.

Anyone who has seen freshly hatched green sea turtles flap and clamber up out of the sand and then down the beach can appreciate how animated they are. Their single-mindedness and independence seems to continue in the ocean.

“The results of our study have huge implications for better understanding early sea turtle survival and behavior, which may ultimately lead to new and innovative ways to further protect these imperiled animals," Mansfield said.

In the past, young turtles have sometimes been found downstream from nesting sites, suggesting they might move passively with currents. They’ve also been found collected in association with drifting organisms, like Sargassum seaweed, also suggesting they’re mainly drifters.

“Our data show that one hypothesis doesn't, and shouldn't, fit all, and that even a small degree of swimming or active orientation can make a huge difference in the dispersal of these young animals,” Mansfield said.

“We conclusively demonstrate that these turtles do not behave as passive drifters. In nearly all cases, drifter trajectories were uncharacteristic of turtle trajectories,” the paper said.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2015

Oceanic plastic mystery: where's it all going?

It certainly isn’t news that the oceans are full of plastics; The news is perhaps how little we know about it.

(Image: plastics collected on the Malaspina Expedition. Credit: CSIC.)

“Our awareness of the significance of plastic pollution in the ocean is relatively recent, and basic questions remain unresolved. Indeed, the quantity of plastic floating in the ocean and its final destination are still unknown,” write scientists who participated in a recent Spanish science expedition.

They found plastics throughout the oceans, and a scientific paper on the results concluded that they’re getting into the marine food chain. 

The researchers emphasized how little is known about the impacts of the plastics—and even where some of the plastic goes. A lot of it is unaccounted for: “Resolving the fate of the missing plastic debris is of fundamental importance to determine the nature and significance of the impacts of plastic pollution in the ocean.”

The Malaspina Expedition of 2010, sent out by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), was named after an early Spanish scientific circumnavigation from 1789 to 1794, headed by Alessandro Malaspina and José de Bustamante y Guerra.

They collected plastics in all the world’s oceans. And they found plastic in both the North Pacific and Atlantic, where it was known to occur in large amounts, but they also found large amounts in the southern oceans: the South Pacific, South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

"Ocean currents carry plastic objects which split into smaller and smaller fragments due to solar radiation. Those little pieces of plastic, known as microplastics, can last hundreds of years and were detected in 88% of the ocean surface sampled during the Malaspina Expedition 2010,” said Andrés Cózar, of the University of Cadiz.

"These microplastics have an influence on the behavior and the food chain of marine organisms.

“On one hand, the tiny plastic fragments often accumulate contaminants that, if swallowed, can be passed to organisms during digestion; without forgetting the gastrointestinal obstructions, which are another of the most common problems with this type of waste.

“On the other hand, the abundance of floating plastic fragments allows many small organisms to sail on them and colonize places they could not access to previously. But probably, most of the impacts taking place due to plastic pollution in the oceans are not yet known,” Cózar said.

The amounts of plastic estimated to be in the oceans is stunning. The Malaspina 2010 paper middle estimates are that there are 4.8 thousand tons in the North Pacific, 2.7 in the North Atlantic, 2.2 in the Indian Ocean, 2.6 in the South Atlantic and 2.1 in the South Pacific.

Some of the plastic is at the surface but even if it is buoyant, some is carried down through the water column via the added weight of biofouling, or being contained in the feces of marine life forms that eat the plastic.

And there may be other methods for sinking the plastics.

“Our observations also show that large loads of plastic fragments with sizes from microns to some millimeters are unaccounted for in the surface loads. The pathway and ultimate fate of the missing plastic are as yet unknown. We cannot rule out either of the proposed sink processes or the operation of sink processes yet to be identified,” the paper says.

It could be that the plastic is being broken down into such small pieces that they’re not getting caught in the sampling nets of marine scientists: “Missing micro- plastic may derive from  nano-fragmentation processes, rendering the very small pieces undetectable to convectional sampling nets, and/or may be transferred to the ocean interior.”

The University of Hawai`i’s Dave Karl edited the paper, Plastic debris in the open ocean, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are

Andrés Cózar,  Fidel Echevarría, Ignacio González-Gordillo, Xabier Irigoien, Bárbara Úbeda, Santiago Hernández-León, Álvaro T. Palma, Sandra Navarro, Juan García-de-Lomas, Andrea Ruiz, María L. Fernández-de-Puelles, and Carlos M. Duarte.

If you’re conversant in Spanish, the Malaspina 2010 website is here. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2014