Ingestion of plastics at sea: does debris size really matter?

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1 School of Civil, Environmental, and Mining Engineering & UWA Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
2 Instituto de Oceanografia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Rio Grande, RS, Brazil
3 Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.603v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Animal Behavior, Biodiversity, Ecology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology
Keywords
microplastics, plastic pollution, plastic debris, zooplankton, copepods, marine debris, plastic ingestion, scanning electron microscopy
Copyright
© 2014 Reisser et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Reisser J, Proietti M, Shaw J, Pattiaratchi CB. 2014. Ingestion of plastics at sea: does debris size really matter? PeerJ PrePrints 2:e603v1

Abstract

Most of our knowledge on plastic ingestion by zooplankton comes from experiments exposing invertebrates to plastic particles smaller than their feeding apparatus. By examining millimetre-sized marine plastics using a scanning electron microscope, we putatively identified some surface textures as feeding marks produced by invertebrates grazing upon the plastic biofilm. We observed sub-parallel linear scrapes with 5-14 μm spacing, which is similar to typical distances between teeth of the mandibular gnathobases of copepods. We also observed peculiar rounded marks close to an unidentified marine worm. Small portions of the plastic particles were apparently removed, and perhaps ingested, during these putative grazing activities. Thus, we suggest that (1) plastic biofouling induces plastic ingestion, and (2) plastic pieces must not necessarily be smaller than the organism for a feeding interaction to occur. Experiments exposing invertebrates to millimeter-sized plastics may support these suggestions.

Author Comment

Based on our scanning electron microscopy observations of marine microplastics and findings from previous studies, we suggest that (1) plastic biofouling induces marine plastic debris ingestion, and (2) plastic pieces must not necessarily be smaller than the organism for a feeding interaction to occur.