New research indicates that microplastics don’t just get ingested into marine mammal’s digestive tracts, but can migrate into their tissue. “Some proportion of their mass is now plastic.”To do the study, researchers looked at tissue samples from 32 individual marine mammals. Species looked at in study Dolphins: Bottlenose Dolphin Seals: Bearded Seal; Spotted Seal; Ringed Seal Whales: Minke Whale; Fin Whale; Humpback Whale; Gray Whale; Pilot Whale; Pygmy Sperm Whale; Beluga WhaleThe samples were gathered from whales in Alaska, California and North Carolina which had either been stranded or had been harvested by subsistence hunters. “While microplastics have been previously documented in marine mammal gastrointestinal tracts, this is the first study to identify translocation and deposition of microplastics into various marine mammal tissues,” the paper said. ‘Underscores scale of this problem’Looking at the downstream effects on humans after consuming marine mammals is also an important area of further inquiry, the paper said.
