For Some Species, Plastic Is Fantastic; August 2012; Scientific American Magazine; by Carrie Madren; 1 Page(s)

Plastic's durability helped to make it a popular miracle material in the early 20th century. Its omnipresence, however, may now be disrupting ecosystems in some surprising ways. A new study by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., shows that the concentration of plastic has increased by 100 times over the past 40 years in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyrean enormous calm spot in the middle of a clockwise rotation of ocean currents that falls between East Asia and the West Coast of the U.S., with Hawaii as its approximate midpoint. The size of the area is estimated to be more than 18 million square kilometers.

The study, published online on May 9 in Biology Letters, also documented for the first time a rise in egg densities of Halobates sericeus, a water strider that lays its eggs on floating objects. The team collected and analyzed data on bits of plastic less than five millimeters across in the North Pacific Ocean, including records from two recent voyages, published data from other sources and data developed from archived samples in the Scripps collection taken in the early 1970s. Author Miriam Goldstein, who is a biological oceanography Ph.D. candidate at Scripps, notes that a 2011 study that examined the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre found no increase in plastic since 1986.