Roughly 80 percent of the debris uncovered in California fish consisted of fibers, whereas all the fragments from fish in Indonesia were plastic.
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According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, up to 90 percent of seafood in the USA are imported, and with the US importing over 100,000 tons of fish from Indonesia in the first half of 2015 alone, it is not unlikely for fish with plastic in their guts can very well end up in homes all over the country.
Chelsea Rochman is with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and is the study’s lead author.
Still, these are disturbing results as it has been suggested by Williams that the plastic continues to degrade with time in the gut and the organisms soak up more of the contaminants that humans consume. However, while there wasn’t a significant difference between the amount of garbage between the two locations, there was an interesting variation in the types debris found.
The researchers sampled 76 fish from markets in Makassar, Indonesia, and 64 from Half Moon Bay and Princeton in California. But in California, only 20 percent of debris was identified as plastic trash.
Researchers have found that about a quarter of fish sampled from across fish markets in California and Indonesia contain man-made debris like plastic or fiber in their guts. “We think the type of debris in the fish is driven by differences in local waste management”. The lack of clean drinking water there only exacerbates the problem, as residents have few options to drink purified water outside of bottled water. “You have the best and the worst situation right in front of you in Indonesia”. This is more common in Indonesia. Scientists aren’t yet sure. It will require the consumers to eat the fish whole in order to ingest the man-made debris, which is only the case for fish such as sardines and anchovies.
The next level of testing will need to find out if the plastic and synthetic materials are leaching into other parts of the fish, and whether there are health effects to humans from ingesting plastic. In the meantime, researchers are looking into whether or not certain chemical compounds can transfer over to the fish meat.
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Crom said the findings won’t stop him from eating fish, and researchers say it shouldn’t.
