Munching on Microplastic

Eight million metric tons of plastic enter the global oceans annually. With an increasing societal reliance on plastics, there is a need to understand the risk of plastics in our ecosystems. Microplastics (MP) are now recognized as a major pollutant threatening aquatic environments across the globe. The impacts of MP presence and consumption on aquatic species is still unknown, especially for microplastic fibers (MPF), which represent the most abundant morphology type of MPs detected in surface water, wastewater effluent, and stormwater. USC Sea Grant funded a study to address the impact of environmentally relevant MPF on aquatic species with different feeding strategies. The study exposes oysters and fish species to environmentally relevant MPF concentrations and monitors uptake, tissue distribution, and relative impact(s) on biomass, tissue damage, and other potential markers of toxicity. This work will be among the first to address MPF toxicity. As California develops new management strategies to monitor microplastics, it is critical that the ecologically relevant effects of microplastic exposure are fully understood.