Corals eat plastic because of the pleasant taste
American scientists in the new study showed that marine life can eat the small plastic particles not due to their visual similarity with food, and due to the chemical components that make plastic “delicious.”
Pollution of oceans with plastic recently purchased scale global environmental disaster. By estimates of ecologists, the total amount of plastic waste in the oceans is about 300 000 tons, and the number of separate pieces of plastic waste is 5.25 trillion. In 1997 in the Pacific ocean was revealed to the Great Pacific garbage patch, a huge cluster of plastic garbage and other wastes — more than 100 million tons of garbage in an area of 1 million km2. As shown by recent studies, even on remote desert Islands accumulate large quantities of plastic particles, which pose a significant threat to marine life.
Previously, scientists have assumed that marine animals and birds eat the micro-particles of plastic due to their resemblance to their usual food. As shown by a new study, this may not be entirely true. And based on toxicity to animals by plastic can be its chemical structure. For his experiment, American environmentalists took a sea coral that eat the plastic and lacked the organs of vision. Therefore, the visual similarity of the plastic food in the case of them fell away.