Amanda Doyle
The Woodlands, TX
2016, Senior, Creative Writing

Plastic garbage is sadly quite a common sight on beaches and in the ocean these days, whether it be in the form of bags and soda rings or bottles and discarded toys. Many know that plastics are bad for the environment because animals often eat these plastics, but the dangers of plastics are far more insidious than that. As plastics slowly degrade, they release toxins into the environment, making their danger twofold. Now, let us take a brief, but important detour before we return to the dangers of plastics in the oceans, what they do to the ecosystem, and why we should care.

Many people, myself included, have a special attachment to the ocean. Personally, it reminds me of Seattle and Vancouver, the city I grew up in and the city much of my family lives in, respectively. The beautiful ocean, the salty-smelling seaweed and beaches (no matter how salty anything else is, only the ocean seems to smell this way), the brief sightings of seals resting on rocks and, if you are lucky, an orca, are all things that give me the perfect mix of nostalgia, awe, and general contentment that one likely describes in simple conversation as “happiness.” However, the feelings one gets from oceans are not simply personal. No, they are far more important than that, shaping human history. From the Akkadians whose lives depended on the flooding of the Tigris and the Euphrates river by the Labrador Sea to the ancient Polynesians who made their journeys in boats, spreading culture and people throughout the Pacific to the European explorations of the New World, leading to the corrupt, yet significant and costly spread of religion, culture, tools, and disease across the world, the ocean has always played a rather important role in our history. However, the ocean’s influence does not stop there, certainly not! What would our very own culture be without works like The Old Man and the Sea, or Moby Dick, or even SpongeBob Squarepants? In short, the ocean means too much to us personally, emotionally, historically, and culturally for us to just ignore the plastic problem.

Now that everything has been put into perspective, it is time to address the problems. First things first, what is plastic pollution? Well, roughly speaking, plastic pollution is simply plastic garbage in the ocean, which is just the literal meaning of the term and perhaps a simplistic meaning. Typically, plastic pollution is made up of food containers, plastic bags, and small industrial waste such as the increasingly researched and frowned upon plastic beads used in things like toothpaste. Well, how much of this human refuse can there possibly be in the ocean? Obviously there is quite a bit, but how much can it really be? Think for a moment, come up with a number (in weight, please), then continue reading once you have found a number that suits you. Both astonishingly and depressingly, “about 13 million tons of plastic” are ditched in the seas every year. That sounds like a preposterously large amount of plastic, doesn’t it? At such an absurdly high number, one would expect that more people would be concerned with such a destructive habit! At such an absurdly large amount, what kind of damage must the animals in the ocean be suffering? What kind of dangers must they be facing? We will never know the full extent of what we are doing to the animals in the oceans and to the ecosystem as a whole, but we can at least know what the general issues are.

The first and most well-known of these major issues is regarding animals being physically harmed by plastics, predominantly by ingesting or getting caught in them. We have all seen the image of the seagull with the soda ring around its neck and of the seal with the netting caught around it. We all know that sea turtles eat plastic bags, mistaking them for jellyfish, their delectable typical dinner. However, the most disturbing of these accounts seems to be what we find in the bodies of big ocean dwellers, the sharks and the whales. On Spain’s southern coast, a dead sperm whale was found with 17 kilograms of plastic in its stomach, most of which was “plastic sheeting used to build greenhouses,” but also present were “plastic bags, nine meters of rope, two stretches of hosepipe, two small flower pots, and a plastic spray cannister.” Sperm whales sadly seem to bear quite the burden in this respect, as one Californian sperm whale was found with 450 pounds of plastic fishing net in its stomach, another in the Lavezzi Islands (just off the southern coast of France) with 100 feet of plastic sheeting in its stomach, and yet another in Iceland that died from a complete stomach obstruction due to marine pollution. But sperm whales are not the only animals suffering from all of this plastic; one dead grey whale found in Puget Sound had “a pair of pants and a golf ball, more than 20 plastic bags, small towels, duct tape and surgical gloves” in its stomach (“The Problem of Marine Plastic Pollution”). Of course, large animals are not alone in their suffering, but toothed whales like sperm whales, as well as sharks, are often apex predators, meaning that they are the top predators in their ecosystem. Apex predators often get the short end of the stick when it comes to pollution, since they bear the weight of their prey’s injuries as well as those acquired without eating another animal. While physical issues with plastic are hugely important, I think that it will be more prudent to discuss the result of plastic pollution that rarely gets mention ­ the toxins released by them.

Many toxins are known to exist in plastics. For example, many people use BPA-free water bottles now, namely due to the fact that BPA, a chemical used in the production of plastics, can damage the brain, especially in fetuses. Frighteningly, BPA was most widely used in the production of food and drink containers, and it can seep into food, especially if plastics with BPA are heated. Luckily, many manufacturers are moving away from using BPA in plastics when they can. However, BPA is still present in many plastics, and other toxins such as DDT (which was actually used in insecticide, but due to its heavy use before Silent Spring and the EPA’s banning of it, DDT continues to affect ocean life, especially since it easily bonds to compounds in plastics), PCBs, and DEHP, which is “a toxic carcinogen” linked to “cancers, birth defects, immune system problems, and childhood development issues.” All of these chemicals have harmful effects, and many of them easily bond to organic tissues, making anything organic (e.g., humans or sharks) in danger of suffering from the horrid effects of these plastics. Now, it was widely believed that plastics would not break down for thousands of years in any normal environment due to the previously held idea that they only decomposed at very high temperatures; however, new studies have found that plastics can dissolve at much lower temperatures in the sea. In fact, a team of scientists from Nihon University in Japan found that polystyrene (a type of plastic often used in Styrofoam, plastic utensils, and DVD cases) can dissolve in seawater at just 86 degrees Fahrenheit. This frightening discovery should prompt people to rethink how they view ocean plastic, as it now presents perhaps an even greater threat than was previously imagined. The deadliness of plastics to both ourselves and to the organisms in the ocean should serve as a wakeup call, hopefully driving us to be far stricter about ocean pollution and hopefully prompting us to try to be more proactive about cleaning up the oceans in their current state.

Before we delve into the ways plastics harm sharks, and therefore part of the ocean ecosystem, it is important to learn a bit of background on these amazing, misunderstood animals. Sharks are ancient creatures, hailing from the Ordovician and Silurian periods of the history of our planet, but the prehistoric shark that is by far the most recognizable, Carcharodon megalodon, or just Megalodon for short, is from the Paleogene, an era stretching from just after the KT catastrophe (resulting in the extinction of the dinosaurs) to about 23 million years ago. Sharks, along with rays, skates, and chimaeras, are cartilaginous fish, meaning that their skeletons are made predominantly of cartilage, but they have many strange and wonderful adaptations setting them far apart from other animals, such as a well-developed ability to detect electric fields around other animals, a lack of a swim bladder (replaced with either a large and oily liver or a need to continue to move, both of which evolved to prevent them from sinking, as a swim bladder would have), and an amazing ability to detect blood in water. Many sharks, especially large ones like the great white, have very long reproduction cycles, meaning that it takes a long time for them to go from one season’s offspring to the next. Some sharks, such as the great white, occupy the apex predator niche in their community. This coupled with their relatively long lifespan makes sharks like the great white incredibly susceptible to problems in the environment due to factors like poisons from plastics or pesticides in the water or in their prey, since apex predators and animals with long lifespans often bear the load of biomagnification, making their flesh more poisoned with toxins with every fresh kill. Referencing the great white shark, great whites are actually rather social sharks and are viviparous, meaning they give birth to live young. Great whites are also rather rare, despite the wealth of movies (most of them fantastically bad) possessing great whites as the main antagonist of the story. Though great whites are often portrayed as cold-killing machines, it may be surprising to hear that they and other sharks are actually surprisingly delicate with respect to the accumulation of toxins in their environment.

Sharks, being apex predators, are greatly affected by plastics, especially by the chemicals that are released by them as plastics decompose in the water. Sharks and many other oceanic predators actually cannot process or even excrete many of the chemicals in plastics or that bind to them, especially PCBs and DDT, so sharks often face even more serious consequences than we humans do. Compounded with their long breeding intervals, this can lead to disaster for many shark. The great white, in fact, is already a vulnerable species, so the threat of plastic chemicals combined with the age old foe of shark finning could lead to horrible consequences for both great whites and for the ecosystem they belong in. The only thing that can worsen the condition of great whites would be if adult great whites could transfer chemicals to their offspring! In a cruel twist of events, female great whites can transfer some of the deadly chemicals within themselves to their offspring in utero. This is perhaps the most sinister form of biomagnification imaginable, and it is caused by people being too lazy to pay attention to their plastic usage and disposal. However, it is not just great whites that are feeling these effects; Greenland sharks have been found with high amounts of toxic chemicals, even though it is a secluded deep water shark. With giant trash floats “twice the size of Texas in the Pacific and Indian oceans” threatening oceanic ecosystems and the animals within them, such as the surprisingly delicate shark, action must be taken to prevent the current already grim situation from escalating to a point that could only be described as mass extinction due to human carelessness. For our sake and for that of the shark, we must take action.

So, what can be done about the current plastic drenched state of the oceans? With so much plastic within it decomposing, leaching toxic chemicals into the environment, what can be done to prevent further damage? Well, advocacy is perhaps the best first step. We must set examples for the people next to us, we must express to them that it is vital for everyone to help protect the ocean. The ocean is not our dump, and we cannot treat it as such. It has provided us with too much for too long for us to betray it for the sake of greed and laziness. For the sake of the sperm whales that eat our trash, we must clean up the ocean. For the sake of the sea turtles choking on plastic bags that have deceived them with the shape of their prey, we must spread the information that we gather to our peers. For the sake of the surprisingly delicate great white, we must emphasize the dangers of letting plastics leech their poisons into the oceans. For the sake of the strangled sea gulls, we must express the importance of this issue to our leaders and convince them to pass restrictions and regulations to help the oceans. For our own sake, we must tell one another and tell future generations not to repeat our mistakes. For the sake of the generous ocean, we must clean up our act, clean up the ocean, continue to spread the word and to lead one another in conservation, and continue to research our own impact on the environment.

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Toxic Plastics and Their Threat to Ocean Life