Fish are eating lots of plastic

I wish they would have provide a quantitative measure of something about how much fish and how much plastic has been found to have been eaten by marine life. Maybe it's in the link they give to "enormous quantities of plastic trash", but it would be nice to have a scale to the problem.

Re: Fish are eating lots of plastic

#6

Post by acdanger » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

jxramos wrote: post #5

I wish they would have provide a quantitative measure of something about how much fish and how much plastic has been found to have been eaten by marine life. Maybe it's in the link they give to "enormous quantities of plastic trash", but it would be nice to have a scale to the problem.

Here is some research: https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/bitstreams/11700/retrieve

Page 93 has some specifics on recorded incidence of plastic ingestion among certain species.

Re: Fish are eating lots of plastic

#7

Post by acdanger » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 6:25 PM UTC

dev_throw wrote: post #4

Bioaccumulation is a serious thing. I suspect increase of plastic in fish might be related to the reduction in sperm count in men.[0][1] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-semen-quality... [1] http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish-plasti...

You have a trailing * leading to a 404 on the second citation. Try this: http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish-plasti...

Re: Fish are eating lots of plastic

#8

Post by dev_throw » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 6:27 PM UTC

acdanger wrote: post #7

dev_throw wrote: post #4

Bioaccumulation is a serious thing. I suspect increase of plastic in fish might be related to the reduction in sperm count in men.[0][1] [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-semen-quality... [1] http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish-plasti...

You have a trailing * leading to a 404 on the second citation. Try this: http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish-plasti...

Thanks, I was having trouble with italicizing things :)

Re: Fish are eating lots of plastic

#9

Post by carapace » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

I have a plan, but it's taking me a bit longer than I'd hoped: http://phoenixbureau.github.io/ReGPGP/

> The only way to clean up such a huge mess is to create a system that mimics the way life would do it. Really, if something could eat plastic there wouldn't be quite such a bad problem. It is because no living creature can digest plastic that it stays around and accumulates. So the solution is to create a kind of artificial life that can eat the plastic. Robots that replicate themselves, with a little bit of manual assistance, and collect and convert the trash into forms that can be used by living creatures.

A little help?

Re: Fish are eating lots of plastic

#10

Post by lend000 » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #9

I have a plan, but it's taking me a bit longer than I'd hoped: http://phoenixbureau.github.io/ReGPGP/ > The only way to clean up such a huge mess is to create a system that mimics the way life would do it. Really, if something could eat plastic there wouldn't be quite such a bad problem. It is because no living creature can digest plastic that it stays around and accumulates. So the solution is to create a kind of ar…

You could probably get it off the ground a lot faster if you lost the self-replicating requirement. (Self-replication / self organization is super cool and a research field of mine, but still a ways away from production).

Just make a lot of them to start with and clean them up when/if they're done. Or make them biodegradable.