Man-made debris encountered in the Indonesian samples consisted mostly in plastic, whereas 80% of the contaminants in the Californian ones were fibers.
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Felipe Preciado of the Half Moon Bay Fish Market quipped that the majority of people don’t consume fish as a whole so he’s not too bothered. The samples were dissected and their guts treated chemically to reveal any plastic or fiber they contained.
Scientists have always thought about the effect the debris thrown into the Ocean has and now, with this study, they seem to have found the answer.
UC Davis researchers analyzed samples of fish taken from California and Indonesia, and were surprised to find that the samples were containing ocean garbage.
More than 100,000 tons of Indonesian fish have reached American shops in the first half of 2015, so there’s a high likelihood that many buyers have already consumed plastic-laden fish. In Indonesia, all of the items found in fish were marine plastics, ranging from tiny fragments to plastic foam to monofilament fishing line. The new study is from the University of California, Davis and Hasanuddin University in Indonesia and was published on Thursday. “We think the type of debris in the fish is driven by differences in local waste management”. About 25 percent, of specimens were laden with plastic. The remaining material found in fish bellies came from clothing fibers-a result, Williams said, determined by each country’s waste management system and laundry habits. The researchers will now focus on seeing if the plastics are leaching into the rest of the fish.
The most common sources of the pollution are microbeads and plastic bags.
“The ubiquity of anthropogenic marine debris and the toxicity of chemicals associated with the material have begun to raise concerns regarding how the ingestion of anthropogenic debris by marine animals may impact human health”, write the authors of the U.C. Davis report.
However, the practice is tradition in Indonesia, where the population more often ingests a fish as a whole instead of filleting it. The matter remains an issue until further research can be conducted about how much of the contamination is absorbed into the meat.
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This plastic contamination is not as hazardous as other types of frequent contamination, like mercury or PCBs, but it is still a problem, and shows that our water filtration and treatment systems are inadequate. Researchers were alarmed by the high percentage of fish contaminated with plastic.
