Study Finds 25 Percent of Fish Eat Rubbish

Researchers found that roughly a quarter of the fish sampled from fish markets in California and Indonesia contained man-made plastic or fibrous material in their guts. In general, fish-filled diets offer major benefits to our overall well-being by providing us with essential vitamins and nutrients.

The team looked at the guts and gastrointestinal tracts of 76 fish bought in markets in Makassar, Indonesia, and 64 fish bought from local fishers at the docks of California’s Pillar Point Harbor and Half Moon Bay fish markets south of San Francisco.

As we’ve written about extensively, there’s a lot of tiny bits of plastic – microbeads from cosmetic products and fibers from clothes are two big sources – that make their way to waterways, where they are often ingested by various creatures and accumulate in the food chain.

Instead, the amount of debris was the same. In contrast, 80 percent of the debris found in California fish was fibers, whereas not a single strand of fiber was found in Indonesian fish. Large volumes of the plastic from these bottles are simply tossed into the surrounding ocean or water.

Meanwhile, the USA has highly advanced systems for collecting and recycling plastics. What’s different, rather, is the type of debris found, as reported by the lead author of the study, Chelsea Rochman. However, most Californians wash their clothing in washing machines, the water from which empties into more than 200 wastewater treatment plants offshore California. Unless the fish is eaten whole, like it is in Indonesia, humans are unlikely to ingest the debris. Acccording to Rochman, the reason for the variation can be attributed to “differences in local waste management”.

Luckily, it is not very likely that the plastic and fibers are finding their way onto your dinner plate in the US.

“The ubiquity of anthropogenic marine debris and the toxicity of chemicals associated with the material have begun to raise concerns regarding how the ingestion of anthropogenic debris by marine animals may impact human health”, write the authors of the U.C. Davis report. Due to unstable filtering systems, the fish winded up consuming fibers.