It’s plastic pollution depriving oxygen?

The plastic waste in the animal world involved swim oceans, kills birds mistaking it for food, and filters to swallow the food chain in fish shows that people eat. A major threat to the sea, this annual plastic pollution estimated at $13 billion economic damage caused over marine ecosystems. It turned out, it also interferes with important marine bacteria, and the effects are much deeper than you might think. Scattered in the upper 200 m of the sea, abundant and important Prochlorococcus bacteria govern many processes known to happen not only in this water, but also in the countryside. These tiny green types have been called the invisible woods sea because they perform similar functions to do what the plants on Earth. Prochlorococcus are photosynthetic organisms that use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen to make the most will be added to the atmosphere smaller plants. It is a type of cyanobacteria that produced the first planet oxygen creatures so that they are essentially the plant ancestors today. Prochlorococcus the most productive on the planet microorganisms can be. They produce almost ten percent of all the oxygen we breathe. A single drop of seawater can contain 20,000 of them. But despite their wealth, they were able to escape modern science to fifteen years ago when Sallie Chisholm, discovered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Robert J. Olson of the species Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Switch the sea water through a flow cytometer, a device that detects and measures physical and chemical properties of particles suspended in liquid cells scientists noticed that Prochlorococcus were then called. Because developed less light in the deep sea water column, very efficient Prochlorococcus to collect light. It ‘also a major player in the global carbon cycle. But scientists at Macquarie University in Australia have discovered that these bacteria are pollution-prone plastic, affecting its growth, operation and production of oxygen. Work in the laboratory, the team exposed two strains of Prochlorococcus living in different depths of the sea, chemical leached from two common plastic products: polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and plastic bags, the high-density polyethylene are produced. The researchers found that exposure to these chemicals Prochlorococcus affect the growth and function, including the amount of oxygen they produce. It also changed the expression of bacteria in many of their genes. “We found that exposure to chemical substances leaching from plastic pollution interfered with the growth, photosynthesis and oxygen production of Prochlorococcus,” says Macquarie University researchers Sasha Tetu, lead author of the study, published in Biology communications. In addition, the higher the concentration of plastic pollution, the diluent is the density of the bacterial population. The next step for the team would take their experiments on the sea and see how Prochlorococcus food in the wild. ‘Now we want to explore, as if plastic pollution is to have the same effect on these microbes in the ocean, “said Tetu. By threatening lack of oxygen in sight? The reduced oxygen production is a ripple effect through the earth’s ecosystems. “Plastic may affect exposure leachate composition marine Prochlorococcuscommunity and eventually the larger composition and productivity of ocean phytoplankton,” the authors noted in this study. We do not start any time soon stuffy, but the magnitude of these changes is not yet understood. Lina Zeldovich has a master’s degree at Columbia J-School and has written for Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian, Newsweek, Audubon, Mosaic science and Hakai Magazine, among other publications. This article was originally published on a daily JSTOR. Read the original article here.
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