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<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Plastic
in the ocean smells like junk food to hungry anchovies<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>by<span
class=apple-converted-space><span style='color:#292B2C'> </span></span><a
href="https://news.mongabay.com/by/vicky-stein/"><span style='color:black'>Vicky
Stein</span></a><span class=apple-converted-space><span style='color:#292B2C'><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>29
November 2017<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>https://news.mongabay.com/2017/11/plastic-in-the-ocean-smells-like-junk-food-to-hungry-anchovies/<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white'><span style='font-size:12.5pt;
font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>As plastic debris drifts
through the ocean, it accumulates a coating of algae and bacteria. That coating
smells delectable — that is, if you’re a fish.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>Northern
anchovies (<em><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Engraulis mordax</span></em>)
find the scent of “biofouled” plastic irresistible, according to a
recent study published in the<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><span
style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Proceedings of the Royal Society B</span></em>.
The silvery schooling fish detect the scent that marine algae and bacteria
transfer onto bits of plastic, and launch into a flashing, darting feeding
frenzy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>Anchovies
are an ecologically and economically important species of baitfish in temperate
waters worldwide. In the northern Pacific Ocean, they are food for whales, tuna
and humans, among many other species. But if anchovies fill up with plastic,
their consumers may have to contend with a new kind of junk in their food.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white'><span style='font-size:12.5pt;
font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>The paper’s lead author,
Matthew Savoca, is a fellow at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration in Monterey, California, researching the effects of pollution
and litter on the ocean and its resources. His study is one of the first to
demonstrate the importance of scent to fish like anchovies. And it reveals one
reason that marine animals might be drawn to plastic in the first place.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>“People
try to make hypotheses about the color, shape and size of plastic pieces, but
to me this [odor] hypothesis seems like one that was really important to
test,” said ecologist Chelsea Rochman, an assistant professor at the
University of Toronto, who was not involved in this study.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>To
determine if anchovies responded to plastics by smell, Savoca and his team
created a strange collection of marine teas. They created different scented
liquids by steeping biofouled plastic, clean plastic and krill. They released
their brews, along with control samples of clean water, into schools of
hundreds of anchovies, set up in tanks at the Aquarium of the Bay in San
Francisco.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>When
the anchovies smelled either their favorite food — small swarming
crustaceans called krill — or Savoca’s smelly plastic tea, they
responded dramatically. “They darted and dashed in various directions,
which is indicative of the foraging behavior of these animals,” Savoca
said in an interview. “These fish are just going bananas for the food and
the plastic, really.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>But
when the fish smelled the clean plastic and plain water, they just kept
swimming in their usual circles.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>Savoca
realized this behavior might historically have been helpful to the fish.
“When animals eat plastic, they’re not actually making a dumb
decision,” he pointed out. “It might smell like food, look like
food, taste like food. It will be really hard for them to learn to reject this
stuff as ‘not food.’”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'><a
href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768" target="_blank"><span
style='color:#45AAE8'>One estimate from a 2015 study</span></a><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>suggested that the rate of plastic
entering the oceans worldwide in 2010 was roughly one dump truck load per
minute. That added an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic to the ocean
that year alone. Despite some efforts, plastic production and pollution isn’t
slowing down.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white'><span style='font-size:12.5pt;
font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>Savoca and other researchers
are starting to examine the effects on fish fooled into eating biofouled
plastic — and the possible consequences for their predators, such as
whales.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>Billions
of people worldwide rely on seafood as their main protein source, Rochman
noted, and their diet may be getting riskier. Plastics contain myriad harmful
chemicals (with acronyms such as BPA and DEHP) that potentially move more
easily into the bodies of fish through a coating of algae and bacteria. Humans,
said Rochman, could start to find evidence of plastic-polluted water in their
fillets and fish sticks.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>“We
have to act now when we’re seeing relatively small amounts of plastic in
the animals we’re eating,” said Savoca. “This could become a
problem of human health concerns and not just animal health concerns.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='line-height:18.0pt;background:white;box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;margin:1rem 0px;word-wrap: break-word'><strong><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'>CITATION</span></strong><span
style='font-size:12.5pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";color:#292B2C'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<ul type=disc>
<li class=MsoNormal style='color:#292B2C;mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:
auto;line-height:18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2;background:white;
box-sizing: inherit;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;text-rendering: optimizeLegibility'><span
style='font-family:"Segoe UI","sans-serif"'>Savoca MS, Tyson CW, McGill M,
Slager CJ. (2017) Odours from marine plastic debris induce food search
behaviours in a forage fish. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 284:
20171000. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2017.1000</span><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Segoe UI","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
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