Turning microplastics into nanoplastics through digestive fragmentation by Antarctic krill

By A. Dawson, S. Kawaguchi, C. King, K. Townsend, R. King, Wilhelmina M. Huston, S. B. Bengtson Nash. Nature Communications, 2018

818 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microplastics (plastics <5 mm diameter) are at the forefront of current environmental pollution research, however, little is known about the degradation of microplastics through ingestion. Here, by exposing Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) to microplastics under acute static renewal conditions, we present evidence of physical size alteration of microplastics ingested by a planktonic crustacean. Ingested microplastics (31.5 µm) are fragmented into pieces less than 1 µm in diameter. Previous feeding studies have shown spherical microplastics either; pass unaffected through an organism and are excreted, or are sufficiently small for translocation to occur. We identify a new pathway; microplastics are fragmented into sizes small enough to cross physical barriers, or are egested as a mixture of triturated particles. These findings suggest that current laboratory-based feeding studies may be oversimplifying interactions between zooplankton and microplastics but also introduces a new role of Antarctic krill, and potentially other species, in the biogeochemical cycling and fate of plastic. Microplastics are emerging ocean contaminants, but their fates in the ocean environment are poorly understood. Here the authors show that Antarctic krill digest micro plastics into nano plastics, thereby generating particles of a size that can cross biological and physical barriers.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97875fced0aecd7964d624e6db57e3c6774a2840

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. E. van Sebille
2. M. Thiel
3. M. Seeley
4. Melanie Bergmann
5. K. L. Law
6. E. Zeng
7. Lei Mai
8. M. L. Guardia

In Pollution

1. E. van Sebille
2. E. Zeng
3. M. Seeley
4. R. Hale
5. Melanie Bergmann
6. Lei Mai
7. M. L. Guardia
8. M. Thiel

Citations in the corpus

• A Global Perspective on Microplastics (2020, background): “Many used fluorescently labeled plastics to track their distribution through tissues (e.g., Browne et al., 2008; Choi et al., 2018; Ding et al., 2018; Dawson et al., 2018; Greven et al., 2016; Jin et al., 2018; Lu et al., 2016; Veneman et al., 2017; Wan et al., 2019; Y Wang, Zhang, et al., 2019).”
• The physical oceanography of the transport of floating marine debris (2020, background): “Some of these processes are not only physical or chemical, but alsomediated by biological activity (Zettler et al 2013, Dawson et al 2018).”