Plastic Sharks?

Associated Press, September 15, 2009

Recently on a scientific fishing expedition to report on the state of the ocean’s fisheries, government scientists made a shocking discovery. An unusual number of fish populations, particularly large predators, now contain large amounts of polymers, also known as plastics, within their cartilage and bone mass.

Researchers are cataloging and taking samples before any official reports are released to congressional and international panels. One researcher who refused to be indentified commented about the discovery, “Everything that washes off our streets comes to the sea, then currents carry it here, this place where the wind just stops. Then you have this graveyard of floating plastic, and all the fish beneath eat it. There’s more tiny pieces of plastic in a hundred square mile radius of us then there is plankton--it works it’s way into and up the food chain.”

The area researchers are conducting their survey lies within the North Pacific Gyre, infamous for stranding sail boats due to the lack of winds, and apparently now, all our trash. The area, comprised of approximately ten million square miles, north of the Hawaiian Islands and west of the California coastline, is now becoming a floating garbage dump.

“These findings do have a positive side. The fish seem to be evolving with the plastic and incorporating it into their bodies, their DNA,” One head scientist anonymously claimed. “At this rate, by the year 2020, we speculate cartilage and bone mass in most schooling fish, all shark, and some whales species, will be replaced by stronger, longer lasting materials similar to pvc and plastics of the highest quality. This could be a scientific harvesting ground for a new generation of “bio-plastics”, which man would have never been able to create without the help of nature’s resilience.”