Researchers now estimate that roughly 11 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the world’s oceans each year, including everything from bottle caps and buckets to discarded fishing nets. The race is on to devise innovative methods for recovering this waste, but efforts such as The Ocean Cleanup contend with how to retrieve debris without harming the so-called neuston—the animals and other organisms living at the surface. But with so little known about neuston, the teams leading these initiatives must consider whether solving the plastic problem risks creating an ecological disruption.
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Far out at sea, plastic trash—much of it discarded fishing gear—gets caught up in currents and concentrated in oceanic gyres. The largest of these aggregations is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, within the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of converging currents that stretches from California to Japan.
Also accumulating in these areas are neuston—snails, sea ...
