Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Volume 53, Issue 9, Pages 5387-5395Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.8b07174
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Funding
- NUI Galway postgraduate scholarship
- Marine Institutes Marine Research Programme [PBA/ME/15/03]
- Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) [13/RC/209213/RC/2092]
- Irish Centre for Research in Applied Geoscience (iCRAG)
- European Research Development Fund
- PIPCO RSG and its member companies
- EMBRC-France [ANR-10-INBS-02]
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The impacts of microplastics on some individual organisms have been well studied but what is less clear is what impacts microplastics have on wider ecosystem processes. Using salps as model organisms, we studied the effect of microplastic ingestion on the downward flux of high density particulate organic matter in the form of salp faecal pellets. While to date most microplastic studies used virgin microplastics at unrealistic environmental concentrations here we exposed Salpa fusiformis to fractured and UV exposed polyethylene and polystyrene microplastics possessing a biofilm. It was found that when exposed to environmentally relevant concentrations, reported for the Mediterranean and the South Pacific Gyre, only few faecal pellets had micro plastics incorporated within them. Under potential future scenarios, however, up to 46% of faecal pellets contained microplastics. Incorporated microplastics significantly altered the size, density and sinking rates of salp faecal pellets (p-value < 0.05 in each instance). Sinking rates decreased by 1.35-fold (95% CI = 1.18, 1.56) for faecal pellets with polyethylene microplastics and 1.47-fold (95% CI = 1.34, 1.61) for polystyrene. These results suggest that today, microplastic ingestion by salps has minimal impact on the biological pump. However, under future microplastic concentrations (or in areas such as convergent zones), microplastics may have the potential to lower the efficiency of the biological pump.
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