(Admiral Giuseppe De Giorgi) Microplastic contamination has now reached incalculable levels in the oceans. Research on the impact of pollution on the marine ecosystem is increasingly numerous and does not seem to leave much room for hope. The last one is published on Frontiers in Marine Science: three out of four fish living deep in the North-West Atlantic are contaminated with microplastics.
These are indissoluble and microscopic plastic pieces that inevitably end up in the food chain. It is easy to imagine where they come from, ie objects or products that human beings use daily in industrial quantities such as fleece clothes or cosmetics: plastic in the form of microspheres that are used in skin products because they can perform an exfoliating function. Once finished at sea these fragments are ingested by marine organisms causing weight loss, reduced nutrition, inflammation.
In turn, microplastics also end up in the organism of predatory species, such as swordfish and tuna fish when they feed on already contaminated fish. The step to get on our tables, as you can imagine, is therefore very short. The study, performed by researchers at the National University of Ireland, examined mesopelagic fish that usually live at a depth between 200 and 1000 meters. But these species go up to the surface during the night to look for food.
After being captured in an area of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, the researchers analyzed their stomachs in the laboratory and the result was not at all comforting: the 73% of these had ingested microplastics.
"We have recorded one of the highest frequencies of microplastics among fish species globally - commented Alina Wieczoreke main author of the study - through vertical movements, mesopelagic fish could also spread microplastics throughout the marine ecosystem, from the waters more superficial to the deeper ones. The high rate of ingestion that we have observed has important consequences for the health of marine ecosystems ".
The authors of the research tend to exclude that the contamination may have occurred through the air: it is in fact a contamination due to ingesting microplastics. The next step will be to understand how they can be finished in the stomachs of fish, given that in theory the area examined was considered rather safe from polluting sources of human origin.