The plastic in the sea is dangerous to most creatures, it hurts or even sever seabirds and makes them fill up with a litter of rubbish. Turtles may mistakenly float the rubbish into jellyfish .
But the way these plastics damage marine small and medium-sized habitats, plankton and corals is poorly understood, and traces of plastic are sometimes found in their small intestines.
Alexander Seymour, a geographic information systems analyst at Duke University in North Carolina and marine researcher, said that over the years, Biologists and conservationists believe that most marine life will eat plastic occasionally, because the underwater world is rich and complex, and marine life can not avoid eating garbage.
More and more studies show that there is a more disturbing reason, There may be an appetite-enhancing ingredient in plastic.
Austin Allen, a doctoral student in marine science at Duke University, said: 'Plastics could have been delicious at first.' 'Alan and Seymour are just a few of the ones published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin The main author of the study.
Together with Duke marine ecologist Daniel Rittschof, they show how corals react to tiny plastic shards, as if the plastics were their food.
The experiment consisted of two major components, including artificially feeding corals and growing coral in seawater containers contaminated with plastic debris no more than a millimeter in diameter.
In feeding trials, scientists tweeted plastic or grit and placed them near polyps.
If the grit is close to the mouth, they cover the body with fine hair to keep it clean, but if plastic is near the mouth, the polyps act quickly and they fire a harpoon-harpoon A gun, also known as a stinging cell (a coelenterate deflector born in the outer layer of the body wall), sends poisonous barbs into plastic chips and then touches the plastic with the tentacle and gobbles up.
Researchers provided polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and other six-medium plastics More than 80% of the plastic debris was eaten by polyp but in one of the ten trials, a polyp tried to eaten once, and Seymour said it would obviously not be the case to throw a sand coral.
In most cases, the corals dispense plastic within six hours, and in about eight percent of the experiments, the plastic remains in the coral body throughout the experiment - within 24 hours.
Corals have no eyes, they can not catch food visually, and tongues are more useful to them, similar to chemical sensors that can be used to judge the quality of food, which obviously differs from using olfaction to attract or move animals away from an object.
Matthew Savoca, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, said: 'Animals will decide whether to eat while they taste food It
Researchers at Duke University have tried to apply a plastic film to the plastic surface to change the chemical profile of the plastic, and they assume that corals may prefer foods that hide the taste of the plastic and give them some nutrients.
But surprisingly, corals prefer the original plastic.
In the tests conducted in the aquarium, coral intake of food clean five times higher than the bio-contaminated plastic.Researchers said that this preference shows that, The factory plastic contains a component that attracts coral, Seymour added: 'At least a few hundred additives act like attractant - a delicious compound.'
Sefka also did not expect the corals to like plastic, and in 2016 he and his colleagues reported that the seabirds were attracted to the smell of unpleasant or even bacteria-laden plastic. Recently, he also found that anchovy fish like to surround the plastic because of contamination And the smell around it.
Seymour said: 'We should use the plastic taste as an example, not just corals.' 'Carlie Herring, a research analyst at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Trash Project, said that few Researchers to study the interaction between micro plastic and coral, the latest study provides them a new perspective.
Researchers at Duke University suggest that the relationship between plastic and corals may be different in the oceans from the experimental situation.Although early studies showed that wild corals would eat plastic, their research did not provide any evidence that coral Like plastic rather than food.
In addition, plastics are less likely to be as severe as other well-known coral bleaching, sour oceans and explosives fishing, Seymour said: "It may just be that coral species are self-extinguishing in the face of a large total number of species The pressure to survive in order for the entire species to survive better).
However, no doubt, There is indeed a lot of plastic in the sea, even beyond the corner, which is beyond our imagination The robotic submersible found plastic bags on the slopes leading to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, where even the explorers had not yet arrived and the plastic was the first to arrive.
Seymour and his colleagues said they hope their research will allow more researchers to pay attention and discover the attractiveness of plastic components to corals. "Sefka also made the same argument: 'If clean plastic does contain Let's find out these attractants and then remove them.
This article was first published in the Washington Post.