Representatives from 175 countries are meeting until Friday in Paris to develop a treaty against plastic pollution. This is an essential issue when there could be more waste than fish in the oceans by 2050. However, according to a small group of scientists, we should not remove plastic already present in the seas because a group of marine species has adapted to it, reports The Huffington Post.


Researchers have shown that while plastic disrupts the food chain of many species, it allows the neuston to proliferate. It is a set of living organisms including algae, molluscs or cnidarians. Among them, we find for example the blue sea dragon Glaucus or the purple snails Janthina. All live on the surface of the water and seem to have adapted particularly well to pollution.


What future for the plastic continent?

Thus, we would find neuston in record quantities in the infamous plastic continent located in the middle of the Pacific. Many of these small floating beings are also found in the center of this continent, where the concentration of waste is the highest. According to scientists, cleaning the oceans would endanger this group of species. "These projects could deprive the world of an entire ecosystem that we do not understand and may never be able to recover," says American ecologist Rebecca Helm in the newspaper The Atlantic.



The plastic continent also represents a real laboratory of biodiversity since waste has brought together species from all over the world. According to a study published in the journal Naturelast April, 80% of these species come from the coast and now live in the company of deep-sea species. Fascinating but potentially dangerous mixtures, according to Mélanie Ourgaud, oceanographer and ecologist at the CNRS. "It can throw ecosystems out of balance, bring new viruses, disrupt fishing," she said.

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