Monthly Archives: June 2016

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Itchy Itchy

Have you ever been swimming in the ocean and felt a sharp prick but seen nothing? Maybe you forgot about it until the next day when painful, red, itchy bumps emerged in the outline of your bathing suit. Some people refer to the attacker as sea lice, but it is no relation to blood-sucking head lice or fish lice. In Spanish there is a better name for it: pica pica. It means itchy itchy.

The little animal behind that painful itch is larvae of Linuche unguiculata, the thimble jellyfish. In spring and early summer adult thimble jellyfish, which are the size and shape of thimbles, congregate in giant orgies. Soon after the females release hordes of young larvae, each the size of a speck, into the ocean. Under a microscope they look like an oval with fuzzy, leg-like cilia surrounding it. Zoom in further and you can see their nematocysts or stinging cells. The thimble jellyfish is endowed with powerful nematocysts because a little, jelly-like animal that doesn’t sting is just that-a little, jelly-like animal. Thimble jellyfish would be defenseless in an ocean of predators and powerless over prey without their nematocysts.

Nematocysts have a spring loaded, toxin-filled thread with a sharp barb at the end. You might feel the pinch of nematocysts when you collide with larvae in the ocean. If, however, you don’t simply collide with larvae, but they instead get squeezed between your bathing suit and your skin, the pinch is more severe. Lots of nematocysts from well-stocked arsenals trigger at once, and poison-filled barbs pierce your flesh. Adults have more nematocysts, there are hundreds or thousands on their tentacles. Unlike larvae, they probably won’t swim down your bathing suit.

How can you swim with the larvae and avoid days of itchiness afterwards? Florida’s Department of Health warns: “the surface area of a bathing suit may increase the area over which stings can occur.” So when choosing a suit, remember small is good and two pieces are better. If you really want to be safe, swim without one, though this isn’t legal at most beaches. The Department of Health also recommends that swimmers in larvae-filled waters take their suits off before showering to prevent more firing of nematocysts as larvae are shocked with fresh water. Unfortunately, showering naked at the beach is also illegal.

A purple flag at the beach is a warning that dangerous sea life, like itchy itchy, is present. Reluctant to get naked but don’t want to waste a good day at the beach? Then grab a bag from the BlueTube at your beach and pick up trash instead. While we can’t keep itchy itchy out of the ocean, we can keep plastic out of it.

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Talking With an Ocean Plastic Rock Star

If there’s a publication, panel, presentation or advisory board on ocean plastic, chances are Kara Lavender-Law is involved. She is like a rock star in the world of ocean plastic. Law arrived at Sea Education Association back in 2003 with a fresh doctorate in physical oceanography and several years later found herself immersed in SEA’s decades-long data set of floating plastic debris. Since the 1980’s, whenever SEA’s ocean research sailing ships are underway, students and scientists tow nets along the surface twice a day and document every piece of plastic captured in every single tow. This has resulted in a motherlode of data. It is a good fit for Law, who says: “I just love digging into data!” I met Law at SEA’s 45th reunion and enjoyed digging into her thoughts on plastic.

I asked Law if biodegradable plastic is the solution to an ocean of plastic. We had eaten with biodegradable plastic forks and knives. If you’ve ever picked plastic out of ocean samples, as most of us at the reunion had, eating with non-biodegradable plastic utensils leaves you with an uncomfortable feeling. After a mere ten minutes of use, it is quite possible for a plastic fork to leak into the ocean, fragment into hundreds of tiny pieces and wreak havoc with sea life for a long, long time. After the party, our cutlery, paper plates and food scraps, were sent to an industrial composting facility and broken down into guilt-free, harmless humus.

The biodegradable cutlery was a nice touch, but Law said biodegradable plastic is not the magic answer. She explained that our utensils were only biodegradable in an industrial composting facility. They won’t break down in the backyard compost pile and can’t be recycled with other plastic. Even if industrial composting facilities were common, and they aren’t, biodegradable plastic would have to be separated from other waste and recyclables. If you’ve ever peeked into your neighbor’s recycling bin, you know that separating waste is already a challenge.

“People love to hate plastic” Law told me, “but it isn’t going away. We just need to use it wisely.” She said that plastic was made to last forever and should be used for products that need to last. Then, after a long, useful life, this plastic should be recycled into something else. “Instead of designing something to take care of our waste, or designing our waste so that the environment will take care of it” she believes, “we should preserve the resource through multiple uses.”

Reducing single-use plastic is a good step towards using plastic wisely and something we can all do. Law told me: “People see images of seabirds with plastic in their guts and animals that are entangled with plastic and it strikes this emotional chord and drives them to act.” When people ask her how they can help, she encourages them to bring their reusable coffee mugs, water bottles, grocery bags and forks with them.

On a global scale, Law says there is an urgent need for better waste management infrastructure in the developing world. With subpar landfills, spotty waste pick up and no formal recycling programs, many developing countries can’t deal with the mountains of plastic they throw out. Most plastic entering oceans leaks out of these countries. Helping them develop good waste management infrastructure is crucial to slowing the flow of plastic into the ocean.

It is nice to imagine a day when the whole world uses plastic wisely and plastic waste doesn’t leak into the oceans. We’re not there yet. You can help keep plastic out of the ocean by picking it up when you see it on the beach. It could be weathered plastic that has washed up from some far off country or a fresh plastic fork left by a careless visitor. It doesn’t matter. Grab a bag from the BlueTube at your beach, pick up plastic and throw it away. Restock the BlueTube with clean, used bags and make it easy for others to keep plastic out of the ocean too.

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Ocean Plastic Data: The Motherlode

The biggest set of data on ocean plastic in the world sits in the basement of Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. SEA has been bringing students out to sea on research sailing ships since 1971. Twice daily, whenever ships are at sea, surface neuston nets are towed alongside. The nets collect zooplankton, tiny animals that float with the currents. They also bring up an alarming amount of zooplankton-sized plastic. Plastic that enters the ocean doesn’t disappear, but it does break into smaller and smaller pieces over time. For decades students and scientists have extracted plastic from net samples, put it in vials and sent it off to Woods Hole.

The samples piled up. Then in 2008, SEA was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to sort through the data. After digging through boxes of plastic-filled vials, old computer archives, paper files and organizing it all, the first papers on this motherlode of data came out. The publication of “Plastic accumulation in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre” and “The size, mass, and composition of plastic debris in the western North Atlantic Ocean” resulted in what one witness called, “an insane media explosion.” Plastic in the ocean was becoming a big concern, but almost no one knew that data going back decades existed. The data were out of the basement!

Data keeps coming in and a frenzy of publications continues. I visited Jessica Donahue, keeper of the data, in the basement recently. “My job is to wring as much information as possible out of every little piece of plastic.” She categorizes each piece by form. Is it hard? Rope? Foam? Film? She measures the size of the plastic with a scanner. Most are tiny, measured in millimeters or centimeters. Donahue puts each piece into a spectrophotometer to identify what type of polymer it is made of. You can’t tell what the plastic started off as, but you can tell if it is polypropylene, polyethylene or polystyrene. Finally she puts the plastic under a microscope to look for surface features which may offer clues to what happens to plastic in the ocean.

Donahue and her colleagues want to find out how long it takes for a large item, say a laundry detergent bottle, to break into millimeter-sized microplastic. What is the timeline for plastic in the ocean? Nobody knows. When they find the answer, it will surely lead to more questions. That, Donahue explains, is the nature of science.

Donahue is breaking out of the basement this month. She is working as a scientist aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer on its transatlantic passage. She sails from Woods Hole to Cork, Ireland with scientists, crew and twenty-two enthusiastic undergraduate students. Twice a day they will tow a neuston net and collect samples. Then donned with headlights and armed with tweezers, students will pick the plastic out of the samples. The job can be tedious and even vomit inducing, but the students know they are contributing to the biggest set of data on ocean plastic in the world and that the answers needed to solve this problem may depend on these data. Brilliant stars, whale sightings, moon rises over the ocean, great music and wonderful people make up for queasy lab time too.

Want to keep plastic out of their net tows? Keep it out of the ocean. When you go to the beach, grab a bag from the BlueTube, pick up trash and throw it away. If your beach doesn’t have a BlueTube yet, sponsor one. Money from every BlueTube sponsorship goes to SEA to support their research on ocean plastic.