Plankton is rapidly escalating the environmental threat of plastic, warns new research.
The microscopic animals are chewing apart microplastics and excreting even smaller plastics, known as nanoparticles, into the oceans and freshwater lakes.
Rotifers, the type of zooplankton responsible, are producing the more dangerous nanoparticles.
University of Massachusetts Amherst discovered that all rotifers could ingest 10 micrometre wide plastics, break them down, and excrete thousands of nano plastics back into the environment.
A single zooplankton can churn out 348,000 to 366,000 nano plastic particles every day.
Each microplastic could theoretically be broken down into 1,000,000,000,000,000 nano plastic particles.
In China’s largest freshwater lake, Poyang, experts calculated zooplankton create 13.3 quadrillion particles every single day, or a thousand million millions.
The team said: “Scale this up to all of the ocean and fresh bodies of water where both microplastics and rotifers are present, and the number of nano plastic particles created every day is mind boggling.”
Normally, nano plastics are produced through sunlight breaking them down and waves grinding segments against rocks, beaches and other little in the seas.
As bottles age, small pieces break off.
However, the team wanted to learn how animals were helping.
Antarctic Krill, another zooplankton, are known to break microplastics down but live in remote locations.
Rotifers are similar creatures, and 2,000 of them occupy in inhabited areas.
Professor Baoshan Xing, UMass Amherst’s Stockbridge School of Agriculture, said: “Humans produce enormous amounts of plastics, and yet we don’t have an effective way of recycling them.
“We began to wonder about nanoplastics and especially how they’re produced.
“Whereas Antarctic krill live in a place that is essentially unpopulated.
“We chose rotifers in part because they occur throughout the world’s temperate and tropical zones, where people live.
“We show for the first time the ubiquitous fragmentation of microplastics by rotifers.
“This is a newly discovered route to produce and generate nano plastics in both freshwater and seawater systems worldwide, in addition to well-known physical and photochemical fragmentations.
“This finding is helpful for accurately evaluating the global flux of nanoplastics.
“In addition, it is known that nanoplastics can not only be potentially toxic to various organisms, they can also serve as carriers for other contaminants in the environment.
“Furthermore, the release of chemical additives in the plastic can be enhanced during and after the fragmentation.
“Our work is just the first step.
“We need to look at other organisms on the land and in water for biological fragmentation of microplastics and collaborate with toxicologists and public health researchers to determine what this plague of nanoplastics is doing to us.”
Microplastics have already made their way to every corner of the globe – from the peak of Mount Everest to the basin of the Marian Trench.
Plastic can take up to 500 years to decompose and research identifies them in many human’s blood and heart tissue.
As yet, the risk of microplastics on humans and the planet is unknown but they are altering ecosystems across the world.
Lead author Professor Jian Zhao, Ocean University of China, said: “We show for the first time the ubiquitous fragmentation of microplastics by rotifers.
“This is a newly discovered route to produce and generate nano plastics in both freshwater and seawater system worldwide, in addition to well-known physical and photochemical fragmentations.
“This finding is helpful for accurately evaluating the global flux of nanoplastics.
“In addition, it is known that nanoplastics can not only be potentially toxic to various organisms, they can also serve as carriers for other contaminants in the environment.
“Furthermore, the release of chemical additives in the plastic can be enhanced during and after the fragmentation.”
Produced in association with SWNS Talker
