Author: Scotty Hendricks / Source: Big Think
- A new study suggests that insect larvae that begin life in freshwater could be eating microplastics and retaining them as they mature.
- It comes at a time when public awareness of microplastics in the environment is increasing.
- The discovery suggests that the problem of microplastics in the environment could be worse than we thought.
The problem of microplastics in aquatic environments is increasingly well known. Between the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean that animals are liable to eat, there is a lot of plastic slowly working its way up the food chain.
However, scientists have recently discovered that fish aren’t the only prey animal we need to worry about eating plastic. Mosquito larvae are perfectly capable of eating microplastics and retain the plastic as adults, opening up a new route for the contamination of animals higher up on the food chain.
How did we find this out?
In an experiment to see if insects could stomach plastic, scientists fed mosquito larvae microplastic beads of various sizes. A random group of the larvae were then examined to see how many of the beads remained in the larvae both shortly after eating them and after they had matured into adults.
As might be expected, the larvae where chock full of microplastic beads, with the average larvae having more than 3,000 2-micrometre-wide beads in their bodies. When they tested the same specimens after they matured, the number of beads had declined to an average of 40 beads per mosquito, but this is still a lot of plastic for a small bug that only spends part of its life living in freshwater.
Why does this matter?
The authors summarize their findings by suggesting that an entirely new route for the spread of microplastics may have opened, saying:
Our results have important implications because any aquatic life stage that is able to consume microplastics and transfer them to their terrestrial life stage is a potential vector of microplasticss onto novel aerial and terrestrial habitats. . . . We have…
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