plankton

A Surprise Journey, an Unexpected New Year’s Gift From Across the Arabian Sea

Of the 14 humpback whales to sport transmitters, she is the sole female, and she alone has made the more-than 1,500-kilometre journey across the bay.

A humpback whale in the Arabian Sea. Credit: Darryl MacDonald

Four days before Christmas, India’s west coast had a surprise visitor. Her name is Luban (Arabic for ‘frankincense’), and she is a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). Researchers had tagged her with a satellite transmitter in the Gulf of Masirah, Oman, on November 17. A month after that event, she took off across the Arabian Sea, arriving well in time for Christmas off Goa.

Scientists recognise individual whales from their tail flukes since each is as unique as a fingerprint. The pattern on the base of Luban’s tail resembles a tree and so her name. Researchers have seen her distinct tail break the sea surface since 2002, but they tagged her only in 2017.

“The whales are not caught,” Suaad Al Haarthi, program director of the Environment Society of Oman, told The Wire. “The tag is placed on the whale from a boat while the whale is at the surface and freely swimming.”

Of the 14 humpbacks to sport transmitters, she is the sole female, and she alone has made the more-than 1,500-kilometre journey across the bay.

“My heart is beating faster than when it was last in love,” said Indian marine biologist Dipani Sutaria in an email a day after Luban surfaced off Goa.

Sutaria alerted a network of ocean watchers – fishermen, naturalists, scientists, Coast Guard, Forest Department, NGOs, customs and port authorities – spread from Gujarat south along the coasts of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Lakshadweep to keep an eye out for the whale. Then, unable to contain her excitement, Sutaria set off to spot this Yuletide visitor from the Middle East.

Whales circumnavigate the world, and none more so than humpback whales. In 2010, one extraordinary female swam 9,800 kilometres from Brazil to Madagascar, setting the record for the longest migration by any mammal. The following year, a Western North Pacific grey whale upset that record by 1,000 kilometres. Humpback whales travel 5,000 kilometres annually from the cold polar waters, where they feed on crustaceans called krill in summer, to breed in the tropics during winter. Luban’s journey pales in comparison.

So why are researchers in Oman and India excited by her coast-to-coast trip? Because the humpback whales of the Arabian Sea don’t behave like other whales, even of their species.

Map of Luban's journey. Source: <a href="http://www.wildlifetracking.org/index.shtml?tag_id=171995&full=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">www.wildlifetracking.org</a>

Map of Luban’s journey. Source: www.wildlifetracking.org

In 1997, Yuri Mikhalev, of South Ukranian Pedagogical University, published a report that shocked researchers. He dug through recently declassified whaling records maintained by the Soviet Union. In 1963, Slava, a 508-foot factory ship, had spotted 20 to 30 humpbacks in the Gulf of Aden, on its way to Antarctica where it hunted whales in their feeding grounds.

Whalers figured humpbacks from the southern hemisphere travelled north into the bay. But the timing of these marine creatures seemed to be off. It was the season to feed near Antarctica. Why were these whales hanging about in tropical waters, presumably starving?

By this time, intensive operations had cleaned up the southern ocean of whales. In 1965, the crew of Slava and another factory ship, the 33,000-ton Sovetskaya Ukraina, one of the two largest whaling ships in the world, took four whales en route to the southern ocean.

In early November 1966, Sovetskaya Ukraina chugged up the continental shelf off Oman, harpooning 62 humpback whales. It steamed across to the Gulf of Kutch, off Pakistan, where it killed 164. On one day, November 15, 1966, the whalers killed 12 off the coast of Bombay. They slaughtered 60% of the whales they spotted, taking 238 humpbacks in all that year. These cetaceans were naïve, never having encountered whalers before or since. The Soviet Union reported these figures neither to the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics, Norway, nor to the International Whaling Commission.

But scientists aboard the whaling ships kept clandestine notes on the butchered whales. Examining these and other records, two researchers – Yulia Ivashchenko and Phillip Clapham – think “the Soviet whalers killed at least 180,000 more whales than they reported between 1948 and 1973” globally. Charles Homans, a journalist, calls the scale and wastefulness of the massacre ‘The Most Senseless Environmental Crime Of The 20th Century’.

Using whaling records, Mikhalev reports about 50% of the 238 whales taken from the Arabian Sea had been feeding. This was unusual since they weren’t known to feed in tropical waters. If they managed to find schools of krill and fish in the same area where they breed, could these marine mammals reside permanently in these waters?

Since the year 2000, the Environment Society of Oman and its partners have studied marine life, including humpback whales, off their coast. They couldn’t find any matches in the fluke patterns between the marine mammals in Omani waters and members of the southern hemisphere population near Madagascar.

Even though the IUCN Red List categorises the species as of ‘least concern’, it recognised the distinct Arabian Sea population as ‘endangered’ in 2008. From scrutinising more than 10,000 photos, researchers estimated that less than 100 Arabian Sea humpback whales were alive. What impact that catastrophic November of 1966 had on this population is unknown.

A 2014 genetics study put the debate to rest. It showed these whales had been isolated from the southern Indian Ocean humpbacks for 70,000 years, dubbing it “the world’s most isolated humpback whale population”. Their nearest relatives, the southern hemisphere humpback whales, breed on a different schedule, reinforcing their isolation. Their slick bodies bear neither the scars of shark bites nor barnacles.

The Arabian Sea humpback whales are the only sedentary whales in the world, feeding and breeding in the same area. And for a good reason.

The waters off Oman’s coastline are fertile feeding grounds. Since the northern Arabian Sea is landlocked, warm summer monsoon winds churn the water, driving phytoplankton growth. The green soupy waters sustain fish and krill, allowing humpbacks to live here all year long.

The network of marine researchers around the Arabian Sea had come to accept the whales’ short journeys up and down the coast of Oman – until Luban’s foray into Indian waters took them by surprise and made Sutaria’s heart beat faster.

Male humpback whales sing haunting songs and have signature flourishes. The song features of the Arabia Sea whales are different from other humpbacks. Credit: Environment Society of Oman

Blue and Bryde’s whales are relatively more common along the Indian coastline. Humpbacks, however, seem to be found only on the west coast and so rarely that Sutaria keeps count.

In a report to the International Whaling Commission, she wrote, approximately 70 to 75 baleen whale carcasses washed up on the west coast between 1980 to 2014. Only seven were humpbacks. In 2006, the Indian Coast Guard took photographs of one, and in 2008, fishers freed another tangled in a fishing net. In March 2016, a male sang his haunting song off Goa.

“No one has carried out long-term surveys in the region, and our current work in India is to monitor the species, either via fishermen who might sight them or via individuals that get washed ashore,” Sutaria told The Wire.

When fishermen see the whales, which they call Maccha Mata, Maccha Raja or Maccha Babu, they don’t approach them out of fear. They break a coconut as an offering and report a description of the fluke to researchers.

Despite the many pairs of eyes scanning the horizon for a spout of water jetting into the air from her blowhole or a fluke breaking the surface, Luban didn’t show herself to anyone. “Madam Luban is on the move, and the satellites are not doing a good job,” Sutaria wrote. “So we are in limbo in Goa on Christmas in field clothes. Such is life!”

By 8 pm on Christmas, Luban surfaced, and her tag marked her position about 50 kilometres off Kannur, Kerala.

Why would Luban make what seems like a long trip for her population? Could something be wrong with her – illness, loss of territory to another? Or could she have followed an oceanic disturbance after Cyclone Ockhi?

“Humpback whales feed on krill and areas of high productivity are of course a reason for them to party,” said Sutaria. “According to Mahi Mankeshwar, who checked the satellite imagery data between December 13 and 18, chlorophyll concentration patches in the central Arabian sea and from Goa to Kerala, India, were dense and rich. We cannot link the two for sure unless we actually re-sight Luban and observe her behaviour.”

Perhaps the whales were travelling locally within the bay. “We had previously suspected that this was a shared population between Oman and other states such as India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan,” says Al Harthi. “However, over the years, we had not had any photo-id matches and no evidence to support this theory. Now that Luban has provided the evidence that there is a more likely connection, this will require further genetic investigation. It could potentially mean that there are more whales out there than had been observed in Omani waters. It also tells us a regional approach is required for appropriate conservation management of this population.”

The tail fluke of Luban showing the tree-shaped marking. Credit: Environment Society of Oman

Humpback whales usually travel with young or with others in a pod. So it’s also possible Luban could have been travelling with companions. “When Luban was tagged, there was another sub-adult whale with her,” says Al Harthi. “We would be curious to find out if they made the journey across the Indian Ocean together, and hope that the team of scientists in India will be able to re-sight them.”

On New Year’s Day, Luban is still off the coast of Alappuzha, out of sight of any humans. “For me, this is sacred, an epiphany for a good start to 2018!” said Sutaria.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

Social image: A humpback whale in the Arabian Sea. Credit: Andrew Willson.

Bizarre Twin Vortices of Water Finally Spotted off Australia’s South

When scientists pored over data from satellites, they found whirlpools of water moving in strange directions, and ten times faster than they usually do.

For the first time, researchers have observed two whirlpools very close to each other as if paired, one spinning clockwise and the other counterclockwise. Credit: Pexels/pixabay

Researchers have observed a bizarre feature in the ocean’s water circulation that had thus far been confined to textbooks and research papers.

Whirlpools, also called eddies, each a few hundred kilometres wide are relatively common formations in the ocean. But for the first time, researchers have observed two whirlpools very close to each other as if paired, one spinning clockwise and the other counterclockwise.

“Eddies can be viewed as ships, transporting heat, salt and nutrients from one part of the ocean to the other,” Anirban Guha, an assistant professor at the department of mechanical engineering in IIT Kanpur, told The Wire. “They predominantly travel [from east to west] with a very slow speed – in the order of centimetres per second.

When two eddies link up, however, they can move ten-times as fast and in the opposite direction, too. So, as Chris Hughes, an oceanographer from the University of Liverpool and one of the researchers involved in the study, told Popular Science, “They carry water in unusual directions across the ocean.”

When he and his colleagues were poring over satellite data, it was this unusual combination of travel speed and direction that gave the eddies away. These eddies – called modons – remain stable and don’t break up because of the speed at which they’re able to move across the water, sort of like a bicycle that doesn’t tip over when it’s moving. “Almost all … eddies drift slowly westwards but this little feature was going quickly eastwards,” Hughes told Popular Science.

He and his colleagues spotted a pair of modons travel across the Tasman Sea, a distance of about 2,000 km, in six months.

Oceanographers predicted decades ago that modons could exist in the sea. The underlying math was elucidated by in the early 20th century by Sir Horace Lamb. That’s why modons are also called a Lamb dipole. However, it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that oceanographers would take them seriously.

In satellite data and imagery spanning the last 25 years, Hughes and co. found evidence of nine modons. Eight were found around Australia and one was found to the southwest of South Africa, in the Atlantic Ocean.

“The current work by the British researchers stands out because, even with not-so-great-resolution data, they were able to identify modons in the southern ocean,” said Guha.

“It turns out that when a clockwise and an anticlockwise eddy come [close] to form a couple, technically a vortex dipole, they together travel at a speed nearly 10-times faster than their individual speeds.”

The circulation of water and the mixing of temperatures and gases ensure that these elements are evenly distributed across the water. When they’re not, their imbalance can drive changes in the weather. This is one reason oceanographers look out for more stable structures, which can help keep things the way they are. Modons are one kind of structure. They derive their stability from the fact that its whirlpools’ tails are connected underwater, forming a giant ‘U’-shaped tube of swirling liquid.

The researchers speculate that modons might even act like a trap. “My thinking is that these linked, fast moving eddies could ‘suck up’ small marine creatures and carry them at high speed and for long distances across the ocean,” said Hughes. His team also suspects that some organisms might be adapting to the nutrient source readily available within the eddies. “It’s quite possible there are shoals of particular types of fish following these eddies for their special conditions,” according to him. Some of the satellite images he inspected showed coloured eddies, suggesting a bloom of plankton could be tumbling about inside the modon.

While it would be interesting to study them further, especially for their impact on the weather, the data is wanting. “The spatial and temporal resolution of satellite data [available for finding modons] is still quite coarse, and not very conducive for identifying modons,” according to Guha.

At the same time, what the British group was able to find – nine modons in the southern ocean over 24 years – suggests they might not be very disruptive. As Guha said, “If modons are exotic and geographically localised, then I don’t think they will greatly contribute to the global ocean circulation.”

It’s not like the little things about modon are fully understood, either. How do modons merge and dissipate? What happens when they stop moving?

The nine modons that have been identified were also probably the clearest. Since there is no sharp cut off to what may be considered a modon, there are many transient pairs of vortices that merit further scrutiny, particularly to the south and southwest of Australia and in the Agulhas Return Current region. We also need to find out if modons occur only in the southern hemisphere.

The paper was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on December 28, 2017.

Vishwam Sankaran is a freelance science writer.

How Life Came a Full Circle for the Snakes That Call the Ocean Their Home

But as anthropogenic pressures on them increase, we lose opportunities to understand these remarkable animals in ways that we cannot imagine.

A beaked sea snake. Source: YouTube

Chetan Rao is a research assistant at the Dakshin Foundation, Bengaluru, with a research focus on the ecology of reptiles, particularly snakes.

“Ek milala aahe [we’ve got one],” says Santosh in Marathi as he points at his net. I am looking at the animal of my research interest, a sea snake. This one in particular is called the beaked sea snake (Hydrophis schistosus). Santosh, like the other fishermen, has been helping me find this elusive animal.

My tryst with sea snakes began a year ago, when we chose the coastal fishing town of Malvan, Maharashtra, for fieldwork. Our study was a collaboration between the Dakshin Foundation, Bengaluru, and the Maharashtra State Forest Department under the UNDP-GoI-GEF Sindhudurg project. It was to investigate the by-catch of sea snakes during regular fishing operations.

Areas around Malvan have beautiful seascapes pocked with large mangrove tracts, rivers and even corals in some places. The place also witnesses a lot of fishing with vessels, which unintentionally catch sea snakes in sizeable numbers. The Indian coastline is 7,500 km long, with amazing diversity in marine habitats. These habitats harbour between 22 and 25 species of these marine serpents. However, our year-long study revealed two species of sea snakes that frequently get caught in fishing nets in Malvan: the beaked sea snake (H. schistosus) and the spine-bellied sea snake (Hydrophis curtus). These findings match with studies conducted along the Goan coast in 2003 and 2009. However, few individuals of the spine-bellied sea snake were found in our study. They seemed to die frequently when caught in the nets, which is likely resulting in a declining population because they seemed to predominate the catch 10 years ago.

These two species are widespread, their habitats ranging from East Africa to Australia, with interesting life histories. Most of their time is spent underwater foraging for their favourite food: fish, including those prized by humans for their commercial value, like sardines, groupers and sole fishes. The beaked sea snake is a habitat generalist: it inhabits mangrove forests and is also found upstream of rivers. On the other hand, the spine-bellied sea snake is a dietary generalist, rarely venturing out of the sea but remaining close to the shoreline.

Being predators, they feed on various herbivorous marine fauna and control their populations, thus preventing plankton from being over-consumed. This way, the ecosystem remains in good health. If all the fish consumed plankton without such controls, the ecosystem might crash, adversely affecting fishermen because they would be faced with depleted fish stocks. Sea snakes feed on a wide range of marine prey, from large moray eels to fish eggs.

Understanding sea snakes

If you think snakes lived only on land, think again. Life has come a full circle for a particular group of snakes that call the ocean their home. This is intriguing because sea snakes diversified mostly within the Indian Ocean; only one species moved over to the Pacific. Three major families of snakes inhabit marine ecosystems from the Persian Gulf to Australia: the Homalopsidae, Acrochordidae and Elapidae. Sea snakes fall within the Elapidae family, under two subfamilies: Laticaudinae and Hydrophiinae. The Laticaudinae are the sea kraits while the Hydrophiinae are considered to be the ‘true’ sea snakes because their entire life is spent underwater. Sea kraits are egg-laying and frequently come on land to find a mate, rest or find a nesting site.

Studies have revealed fascinating insights into their biology and adaptation to sea life. These animals are marvellous engineers and have undergone some remarkable physical adaptations to survive under water. Sea snakes possess an elongated lung, flat oar-shaped tails, subcutaneous respiration (they breathe through their skin like amphibians) and scales that have tiny structures called sensory sensilla to help them feel their environment.

A team of researchers from the school of biological sciences at the University of Adelaide found in 2013 that sea snakes are a rapidly evolving group of marine snakes. Their ancestral source was Australasian, and the ancestor is thought to have first appeared around 6.9 million years ago.

Sea snakes seem to have undergone rapid speciation to become extremely diverse within a short span of time. There are about 75 known species reported from a region that scientists call the Indo-Australian archipelago, a marine biodiversity hotspot. A bulk of this diversity occurs in Southeast Asia and Australia. These studies have also revealed that the South and Southeast Asian populations of some widely distributed species are genetically distinct, making them interesting models for evolutionary studies.

Threats to sea snakes

Sea snakes are one of the most visible by-catch – catch with no commercial value – in fishing nets wherever they are abundant. As they hunt fish, they seem to get caught in large numbers themselves. This brings them in direct contact with fishermen. The snakes are highly venomous and often have to be physically removed from the net, so they are often perceived as pests or nuisance. They are also killed by stress and/or when they drown (being air-breathers, sea snakes have to periodically surface to catch a breath before diving back inside).

A 2012 vulnerability assessment of the Great Barrier Reef threw more light on the impacts of fishing of sea snakes, with an estimated 105,000 snakes caught each year. Caught snakes often drown or get crushed in trawler nets. A local decline in the numbers of certain sea snakes has also been reported from studies along the Goan coast. Their populations are highly localised, which means the individuals from a population do not travel far from the area in which they are born, making them vulnerable to local fishing pressures. However, with continued mortality, populations crash and this may have a cascading effect on their ecosystems.

Another 2013 study has revealed that “globally, 9% of sea snakes are threatened, 6% are near threatened and 34% are data-deficient categories defined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature”. Sea snakes are also not listed by the Convention on International Trade on Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora. And while they are protected in India under Schedule IV of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, the conservation of sea snakes is virtually non-existent in Asia. In Thailand and Vietnam, where sea snakes are harvested and have high commercial value, an accidental snakebite is treated by ingredients including rhinoceros horns, either applied directly to the wound or made into a paste and swallowed. This is an unusual connection between the sea-snake and rhino-horn trades.

These animals are also affected by pollution. An August 2017 study from Australia showed that melanism induced by industrial pollution occurs in the turtle-headed sea snake (Emydocephalus annulatus). In this case, individuals from a population in the polluted inshore bays of Pacific Island, New Caledonia, were completely black in colour as opposed to the white and black bands around them. This colour change was the result of arsenic and zinc pollution near snakes close to the bay.

Snakes have been on this planet for over 100 million years. During the course of their existence, they have shaped ecological communities and colonised almost every available habitat on our planet. But as anthropogenic pressures on them increase, we lose opportunities to understand these remarkable animals in ways that we cannot imagine.

Q&A: A Plastic Ocean – Can a Movie Help Us See This Invisible Crisis?

“It’s the images that sell a film, if you don’t have those, you’re dead in the water. So we thought, what about the effects on big charismatic animals, the baleen whales that feed on plankton?”

It’s the images that sell a film, if you don’t have those, you’re dead in the water. So we thought, what about the effects on big charismatic animals, the baleen whales that feed on plankton?

Plastic pollution a water body. Credit: olenalavrova/shutterstock

Scientists have warned about the dangers of plastic pollution and microplastics in the environment for a while now. But most people still aren’t convinced of the link between carelessly discarding a water bottle and damage in the seas. After all, plastic in the ocean doesn’t have the powerful symbolism of nuclear plants or oil spills: most of it is below the waves, often invisible to the naked eye.

A new documentary feature film, A Plastic Ocean, wants to change all that. It follows several popular films on the oceans that have successfully shifted attitudes and even shaped legislation. The End of the Line triggered a wave of media attention on unsustainable fishing practices, while SeaWorld finally agreed to halt its orca breeding programme after the “Blackfish effect”.

I’m a media sociologist specialising in science communication. As part of my research I recently spoke to the movie’s producer, former BBC Blue Planet producer Jo Ruxton. She discusses the film, and her hopes that it will create a cultural shift in public perceptions and behaviour concerning plastic pollution.

Lesley Henderson: You’ve always been interested in the ocean through your work as a filmmaker and have spent several years living on islands around the world. Was there something specific that prompted you to create this film?

Jo Ruxton: I’d heard about the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, a floating continent twice the size of Texas and ten metres deep. I started looking into it but couldn’t find any pictures or anything on Google Earth. I went out to the centre of the North Pacific to look for it on an expedition with scientists and volunteers and but we still couldn’t see it.

Then we started to do surface plankton trawls about 400 miles off San Francisco just to see what was in there. The closer we got to the centre the more plastic we found. Every trawl was coming up jam-packed with plastics but when you actually looked out on the water you could hardly see anything. There were a few floating bits around but it certainly wasn’t a ten metre deep continent.

I talked to the scientists and found out that plastic becomes very brittle in sea water because it’s subjected to sunlight, waves and salt and it takes about 20 years to get from the coast to the centre. It breaks up until it’s smaller and smaller and now of course it’s mixing with the plankton. That to me was a much more insidious story because if it’s mixing with the plankton it’s clearly getting into the food chain which can’t be good for the plankton and the fish that are feeding on it.

A group of sperm whales recently stranded in Germany were starving – their stomachs were full of plastic. Credit: Christian Charisius/EPA

LH: So were there particular visual challenges of filming microplastics? How did you overcome these?

JR: It’s the images that sell a film, if you don’t have those, you’re dead in the water. So we thought, what about the effects on big charismatic animals, the baleen whales that feed on plankton? We used interesting scientists: seeing a woman walk along the side of the jetty with a crossbow slung over her shoulder and finding out she’s a professor about to go and shoot dolphins to take blubber samples makes you sit up and watch.

Another scientist was doing night dives and trawls looking at lantern fish travelling up from the depths and finding pieces of plastic in their stomachs. The visual images of squid hunting at night in torch light are quite special. To get people interested it was a case of finding the right animals, getting the images, and getting some fun stuff in there including “boys toys” like a submersible.

LH: How did you approach presenting the scientific information about the risks to human health posed by microplastics?

JR: We used lay people (champion free diver Tanya Streeter and journalist Craig Leeson) to ask the questions. Though we’ve really simplified the science, every statement we make has been backed by peer-reviewed papers.

Tanya Streeter checking the health of a reef in Fiji. Credit: David Jones, Author provided

This link between chemicals leaching out of plastics and plastics attracting chemicals was particularly difficult to explain. Tuvalu was the most important sequence: here was a place drowning under its own plastic waste. They’re just burning it, and kids are playing with bonfires as they come home from school. We filmed a family group of 30 and five had cancer and two more had died of it in the previous 18 months. We know that furans and dioxins have been linked to cancer and we know that those gases are produced when we burn plastic but no one’s linked the two.

LH: In the film you show deposit schemes in Germany where people receive money for recycling plastic bottles – was part of your aim to try to create value for plastic?

JR: The movie has for key messages: it’s about health, value, charismatic animals and it’s about the environment. I care about all four but even if people don’t care about their own health they might care about money, if they don’t care about people and the environment then they care about money.

LH: Why a feature documentary film rather than other forms of media or education?

JR: There are a lot of short films on the internet but I think there is now more of an appetite for big environmental films. The End of the Line brought huge change, the whole Hugh’s Fish Fight changed policy in Europe, Blackfish too – it’s not just the tree huggers who are going to see it. An Inconvenient Truth was basically a power point presentation but was powerful enough to get a lot of people sitting up and thinking.

So why not have one about plastic pollution? It is a growing concern, we’re finding out more and more about it and perhaps this is the way forward. I can go and give lectures to 100 people at a time but a successful film can reach many more people.

LH: How do you envisage that audiences will engage with A Plastic Ocean?

JR: I think it will be an eye opener. One of the reasons environmental films are so hard to get commissioned is because they’re very doom and gloom. It’s people who already care who come and watch them and they come out feeling like they’ve been punched in the stomach and guilty every time they eat a fish or start the car up. But the last 20 minutes of this film is dedicated to “what we can do” in terms of legislation, technology, or changes in our behaviour.

LH: So what you’re trying to do is trigger a cultural change?

JR: Yes cultural change is probably the biggest thing along with legislation. If there is an oil spill it’s all hands on deck to clean it up and restore the habitat. If plastic was reclassified as hazardous that’s exactly what we would be doing: restoring habitats and doing something positive with all that plastic.

Lesley Henderson is Senior Lecturer in Sociology & Communications, Institute for Environment, Health & Societies, Brunel University London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.