Wildlife researchers say that toxic pollutants and chemical additives find their way into animal tissues when they eat microplastics, according to a new press release.
The study was conducted with two primary objectives, the first one being to determine whether these toxic materials enter the tissues of organisms. The second objective was to measure the extent of health hazards these organisms experience owing to these toxins.
For the study, lugworms (Arenicola marina) were exposed to sand that contained 5 percent microplastic with common chemical pollutants (nonylphenol, phenanthrene) and additives (Triclosan, PBDE-47). Researchers later found that the microplastics present in the tissues of these lugworms were in concentrations that affected the key functions that normally sustain health and biodiversity.
"The work is important because current policy in the US and abroad considers microplastic as non-hazardous," said lead author Mark A. Browne, a postdoctoral fellow at NCEAS in the statement. "Yet our study shows that additives, such as Triclosan (an antimicrobial) that are incorporated into plastics during manufacture, caused mortality and diminished the ability of the lugworms to engineer sediments. Large accumulations of microplastic have the potential to impact the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems."
Some of the biological effects of consuming microplastic included thermal stress and the inability to consume as much sediment.
"If the animals are not able to eat as much then there is a change in the function of the organisms and there is an impact on the semblance of the species found in an area," Brown told BBC News.
This is the first study of its kind that highlights the health effects of microplastics consumed by marine organisms.
"For about 40 or 50 years, we have been finding very large concentrations of chemicals in animals. Then they started to find animals with larger concentrations of pollutants and plastics, so researchers began to establish this correlation," the researcher concluded. "But no-one had actually shown whether chemicals could transfer from plastic when they are eaten by animals and accumulate in their bodies and reduce important functions that maintain their health."
