Analyze This: Corals stash microplastics in their skeletons

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Plastic pollution is piling up all over Earth and entering the oceans too. That includes tiny bits called microplastics. These are pieces that are about the size of a grain of rice or smaller. Now, researchers have found that corals stash a surprising amount of those tiny plastic shreds in their tissues and skeletons.

Millions of metric tons of plastic may find its way into the ocean every year. But the amount of plastic floating in seawater seems too low compared with what gets into the oceans. Researchers don’t yet know where all that missing plastic goes. But one destination may be corals. Researchers have actually seen some corals munching on plastics. But it isn’t clear if that’s the only way plastics get into corals and whether corals hang onto plastic for a long time.

Jessica Reichert is an ecologist at Justus Liebig University Giessen in Germany. In the lab, Reichert’s team grew four species of coral that build reefs. For 18 months, the researchers exposed these creatures to pieces of black polyethylene. This is one of the most common plastics in the ocean. It’s used in bags and bottles. The black color made the plastic easy to see when corals gobbled it up or grew their skeletons over it.

At the end of the experiment, the researchers tallied up how much plastic the corals took in. Most plastic debris inside corals was in their skeletons rather than tissues. The researchers shared these results October 28 in Global Change Biology.

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