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Scripps scientists find plastic in 9.2% of lanternfish collected. The small fish are commonly eaten by larger species, and the plastic could end up in the food chain.

July 02, 2011|By Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times
  • Two lanternfish are surrounded by bits of plastic collected during survey.
Two lanternfish are surrounded by bits of plastic collected during survey. (Jim Leichter / Scripps Institution…)




The results came from a 2009 voyage a group of graduate students made to the so-called Pacific Garbage Patch, an area with a high concentration of fragments of floating garbage about 1,000 miles off the California coast. Researchers cast nets into the water and collected 141 fish, mostly lanternfish measuring just a few inches, and took them to a laboratory in San Diego to dissect.

Scientists found plastic debris in 9.2% of their stomachs, much of it broken down into multicolored fragments smaller than a human fingernail. However, they believe the actual proportion of fish that have consumed plastic is significantly higher.

"We can't tell how many fish ate plastic and died, how many fish ate plastic and regurgitate it or passed it out of their intestines," said Rebecca Asch, a Scripps doctoral candidate in biological oceanography and one of the study's authors.

Because lanternfish are a common food source for larger fish, the study raises concerns that the plastics and pollutants they ingest could make their way up the food chain into seafood eaten by humans.

Scripps found a lower rate of plastic ingestion than previous research, such as a study by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation that found plastic in the stomachs of 35% of fish in the same general area of the Pacific.

Past studies may have been inflated by keeping nets in the water for longer periods of time, giving fish the chance to eat bits of plastic swept up in the nets with them, Scripps scientists said. In their study, the Scripps researchers tried to minimize that by towing their net only 15 minutes at a time. But they stressed that their study broadly concludes the same thing: Garbage is present in the food chain.

"We're still finding a substantial amount of plastic," Asch said. "It should be zero."

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