Common Worms Could Solve our Global Plastic Crisis : Discovery News

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LifeontheOceanFloorGarbagePatch:Photos

View Caption +#1: One Fish, Two fish, Red Fish, Shoe fish

Trash on the bottom of the ocean used to be out of sight and out of mind, but a project by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) brought images of deep sea dumps to the surface. The MBARI team observed more than 1,500 pieces of trash on the seafloor from Vancouver Island to the Gulf of California, and as far west as the Hawaiian Islands. Oceanic life sometimes made the best of this bad situation by colonizing the garbage. For example, this young rockfish is a shoe-in for survival and adaptation at 472 meters (1,548 feet) deep in San Gabriel Canyon, off Southern California.

MBARI

View Caption +#2: Seafloor Social Network

Other young rockfish swim around discarded fishing equipment on the floor of Monterey Canyon off the coast of California. Luckily for them, the net isn't working. While some marine life may be able to adapt to human garbage, oceanic trash can trap animals, release toxins, smother plants and have other negative effects.

MBARI

View Caption +#3: Boxing Day for Crabs

An octopus coils and crabs crawl over a metal box 2,432 meters (7979 feet) deep in Monterey Canyon.

MBARI

View Caption +#4: Container Overboard

This shipping container was discovered by MBARI four months after it fell off the merchant vessel Med Taipei during a storm in February of 2004. The container was just one of the estimated 10,000 shipping containers lost overboard every year.

MBARI

View Caption +#5: Drums in the Deep

A wanna-be Sebastian the Crab, from Disney's the Little Mermaid, may be planning to turn this drum into a percussion instrument for a calypso band under the sea. The 55-gallon drum lies 2,892 meters (9,488 feet) deep in outer Monterey Canyon.

MBARI

View Caption +#6: Cardboard Crabs

Even fragile garbage like this old cardboard can become part of the ocean floor ecosystem if it isn't handled with care. However, the crabs may be grouchy that cardboard covers their habitat 3,950 meters deep, offshore of Point Conception, Santa Barbara County, California.

MBARI

View Caption +#7: Wheel Life

A sea anemone (top) and sea cucumber (right) gained traction on the surface of this tire submerged 868 meters (2,850 feet) beneath the waves in Monterey Canyon.

MBARI

View Caption +#8: Always Coca-Cola

The ubiquitous Coca Cola logo can be found even 1,200 meters deep in Monterey Canyon.

MBARI

View Caption +#9: Classic Fish Pun

This old shoe is in pretty bad shape, but it seems to still have its sole...or is that a flounder (upper left)?

MBARI

View Caption +#10: It's in the Water

The slogan of Olympia beer, “It's the water,” can barely be read on this old can. In this case, lots and lots of water.

MBARI

View Caption +#11: Lost Deposit

Someone didn't turn in this soda bottle for a deposit. Instead, deep in the sea, brittle stars creep around the bottle on Davidson Seamount, 60 miles offshore of California and 1,727 meters (5,666 feet) below the ocean surface. "The most frustrating thing for me is that most of the material we saw—glass, metal, paper, plastic—could be recycled," said Kyra Schlining, lead author of the MBARI study published in Deep-Sea Research, in a press release.

MBARI/NOAA

View Caption +#12: The Long Black Veil

A gorgonian coral wears a veil of black plastic 2,115 meters (almost 7,000 feet) deep in Astoria Canyon, off the coast of Oregon. The veil could become a death shroud if the plastic were to completely cover the coral and block coral polyps from feeding.

MBARI

View Caption +#13: Dr. Pollution

Dr. Pepper's slogan could be modified to, “Would you like to be a polluter too?” for this can submerged 1,529 meters deep on Axial Seamount, off the Pacific Northwest's coast. The nearby brittle stars probably can't tell the difference between Dr. Pepper detritus and Mr. Pibb pollution.

MBARI

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Mealworms can safely and effectively biodegrade certain types of plastic waste, according to groundbreaking new research from Stanford University and China’s Beihang University.

In two newly released companion studies, researchers reveal that microorganisms living in the mealworm’s gut effectively break down styrofoam and plastic into “biodegraded fragments that look similar to tiny rabbit droppings.”

Photos: Life on the Ocean Floor Garbage Patch

In fact, worms that dined regularly on plastic appeared to be as healthy as their non-plastic-eating companions, and researchers think that the waste they produce could be safely repurposed in agriculture.

“There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places,” Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, says in a news release. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock.”

Further research is needed before the worms can be widely deployed to munch the world’s growing supply of plastic waste. The studies released today focused solely on Styrofoam and polystyrene, a type of plastic widely used in packaging, appliances and electronics — future investigations will look into whether or not the worms can biodegrade polypropylene (used in textiles), bioplastics and microbeads.

8 Trillion Small Plastic Pieces Enter Aquatic Habitats Daily

Plastic waste takes notoriously long to biodegrade — a single water bottle is estimated to take 450 years to break down in a landfill. Due to poor waste management, plastic waste often ends up in the environment: recent unrelated research has revealed that 90 percent of all seabirds and up to 25 percent of fish sold in markets have plastic waste in their stomach.

This story originally appeared on DSCOVRD.