After swimming between toilet seats and plastic bottles for 80 days, he discovered countless beautiful lives

In June 2019, long-distance swimmer Ben Lecomte embarked on an unprecedented challenge: swimming through a giant garbage dump for 80 consecutive days.

This "garbage patch" floats in the Pacific Ocean and is the world's largest concentration of marine garbage. The adventure of crossing the garbage patch is both an environmental publicity campaign and a scientific research mission.

Leconte spends 6-8 hours a day swimming in the garbage belt. He travels between toilet seats, plastic bottles, old toothbrushes and abandoned fishing nets, and witnesses the dense blizzard-like influx of plastic garbage particles. "This scene is disgusting and very, very worrying."

Ben Lecomte

But that wasn’t his only discovery. “Whenever I see floating plastic debris, it’s always full of life around it,” Leconte said. Tiny jellyfish blooming like flowers, conchs with violet shells, and sea slugs with bright blue bodies… These beautiful little creatures gather here in amazing density, trying to survive among the garbage.

Surprising amounts of floating marine life have been found in areas of floating garbage | Open Ocean Exploration

Life in the garbage

This garbage patch is located in the heart of the North Pacific Ocean, covering 1.6 million square kilometers of sea surface. According to a 2018 study, there are at least 80,000 tons of floating garbage here, and the amount of garbage is growing exponentially. Unlike on land, the marine garbage patch does not have a "hill" of garbage - it looks more like a "garbage soup" mixed with a lot of debris.

A Janthina species that floats near the water's surface in a bubble of mucus | Denis Rieck

Leconte found marine life clustered in the garbage, and the scientists who traveled with him on the support ship also confirmed this. They selected different locations in the outer and central areas of the garbage belt to collect samples and counted the density of garbage and floating organisms in the surface seawater. The results showed that there was a clear positive correlation between biological density and garbage density: the more garbage-dense the central area, the more floating organisms there were.

Silver coin jellyfish (Porpita porpita), these tiny jellyfish are often called "blue buttons" | Denis Rieck

These organisms gathered with garbage include cnidarians such as Portuguese man-of-war, sail jellyfish, silver coin jellyfish, mollusks such as sea slugs and purple snails, copepods, algae, etc. These organisms are widely present in the surface of seawater around the world, but their density in the garbage belt is particularly high, even reaching the highest level reported in previous literature.

Glaucus sea slug | Denis Rieck

Salvaging garbage, killing lives

These little creatures do not live with the garbage because they like it. Marine garbage has no attraction to them and is of no benefit to their survival. They are just brought here by a strong external force and gather here with the marine garbage - this force is the ocean current.

Garbage patches are created by ocean currents, the same forces that pull floating organisms together | NOAA

These little guys, called "floating organisms," have very limited autonomous movement capabilities, and their long-distance migration mainly relies on the power of wind and water currents. This garbage belt in the Pacific Ocean was created by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and the same force also acts on floating organisms, gathering them and the garbage together. Therefore, the more plastic garbage is gathered, the higher the density of floating organisms in the seawater will be.

Velella, shown here from above | Denis Rieck

This accumulation increases the harm of garbage to marine life. Not only are floating organisms themselves exposed to high-density plastic garbage, but the entire food chain in the surface ocean is also affected. Seabirds, fish and turtles that feed on floating organisms will also gather here with their prey. They look for food in the "garbage soup" and swallow a large number of plastic particles by mistake.

Floating organisms are an important part of the marine food chain | Open Ocean Exploration

On the other hand, it also greatly increases the difficulty of human beings to remove marine debris. It is undoubtedly a very bad thing that countless floating marine creatures live in the garbage debris. However, using simple and crude means to salvage the garbage may be worse - researchers point out that doing so may kill a large number of fragile floating creatures and cause a huge blow to the entire ecosystem.

The collected samples are mixed with garbage fragments and organisms. If the marine garbage is filtered in a simple and rough way, these small lives are likely to be killed together | Open Ocean Exploration

There may not be a clear answer to how to clean up marine debris in a way that minimizes the damage, but what is certain is that we should first try our best to prevent garbage from flowing into the ocean from land.

References

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

[2]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.26.489631v1

[3]https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1520107539785871362

[4]https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpn88/man-swims-through-ocean-garbage-patch-for-months-finds-amazing-life

Author: Window Knocking Rain

Editor: Jianer

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