Billions of plastic objects suffocating coral reefs
31 January, 2018
Billions of bits of plastic waste are entangled in corals and sickening reefs from Thailand to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, scientists have said.
The trash is another pressure on corals, already suffering from overfishing, rising temperatures caused by climate change and other pollution.
In the Asia-Pacific region a total of 11.1 billion plastic items — including shopping bags, fishing nets, even diapers and tea-bags — are ensnared on reefs, the scientists wrote in the journal Science.
They projected the numbers would rise by 40 percent by 2025 as marine pollution gets steadily worse.
The plastic increases the likelihood of disease about 20 times, to 89 percent for corals in contact with plastics from four percent in comparable areas with none.
Trash may damage the tiny coral animals that build reefs, making them more vulnerable to illness. And bits of plastic may act as rafts for harmful microbes in the oceans.
Scientists were shocked to find plastic even in remote reefs.
“You could be diving and you think someone’s tapping your shoulder but it’s just a bottle knocking against you, or a plastic trash bag stuck on your tank,” lead author Joleah Lamb of Cornell University told Reuters.
“It’s really sad,” she said.
“Corals are animals like us and have really thin tissues that can be cut and wounded, especially if they are cut by an item covered in all sorts of micro-organisms,” she said.
The scientists, from the United States, Australia, Thailand, Myanmar, Canada and Indonesia, surveyed 159 reefs from 2011-14 in the Asia-Pacific region.