When plastic in the ocean is broken down by the sun, what happens to the surrounding ocean and it’s living inhabitants? To answer this question, visiting graduate student Lixin Zhu, Associate Professor Aron Stubbins, and their team exposed plastic to UV radiation in the lab and observed the impact on bacteria and other microbes living in surrounding ocean water.
Results indicated that as the degraded plastic released dissolved organic carbon, some microbes were able to utilize the additional carbon to increase their growth, but for other microbes, growth was inhibited by the presence of degraded plastic. These findings, recently published in The Journal of Hazardous Materials illustrate the complexity of interactions between marine debris, the environment, and marine organisms. The Stubbins lab will continue and extend this research investigating sunlight’s impact on ocean plastic, thanks to a new grant from the National Science Foundation.