Almost two and a half million pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural chemicals, lawn fertilizers, and leaky septic tanks flow into the lagoon each year. As the water quality has deteriorated, some manatees have been wintering in waters warmed by discharges from power plants along Florida’s Atlantic coast.
The researchers did a global analysis of mounting studies of plastic pollution in the ocean and found data on plastic ingestion for 555 species of marine and estuarine fish. Their results showed that 386 fish species — two-thirds of all species — had ingested plastic. And of those, 210 were species that are commercially fished.
Not surprisingly, places with an abundance of plastic in surface waters, such as East Asia, led to a higher likelihood of plastic ingestion by fish.
Neptune 911! 