Living In The Plastisphere

In the shadows of trash island lurks something far more tentacular: jellyfish with plastic embedded in their bodies; bacteria metabolizing synthetics for energy and nutrients; whole populations of ocean insects not merely surviving but flourishing with plastic.When I set out in pursuit of synthetics on the Sea Dragon, I was not at all expecting to encounter communities of marine life inhabiting, traveling, and even thriving with plastic.A desolate trash island loomed far closer on the horizon of possibility than any kind of living relations.Wasn't the entire expedition motivated by the harms plastic poses to oceans, not merely as an aesthetic afront to visions of pristine environments but as downright dangerous to lively bodies?My shipmate, marine ecologist Dr. Hank Carson, was not surprised.He had joined the expedition with the explicit intent of studying the emergent relationships between floating ocean plastic and marine life.Midway through the voyage, Carson was giving me a tour of the tiny, improvised laboratory space below deck on the racing sailboat turned research vessel: a sleeping berth with the mattress removed to form a workbench.Wedged beside a bread maker, with his laptop perched on a freezer that filled with scientific tissue samples as it was emptied of meat for human consumption, Carson was taking digital microscope images of invertebrates found on plastic objects the crew had plucked from the garbage patch earlier in the day.It was here, as I gawked at the lavender spiral of a sea snail magnified against a stark white background, that I first heard the term "plastisphere."The plastisphere, as Carson explained, is the name that marine ecologists have given to communities