Plastic Eating Worms Take Pollution To its Source
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A favourite with anglers, lugworms may accelerate the arrival of toxic substances in our food by gorging themselves on grains of waste plastic in sediment.
The particles are bits of plastic waste that are broken down in the sea and which then soak up waterborne contaminants. Since lugworms are sediment-feeders and low in the food chain, the contaminants will be concentrated when the worms are eaten by fish and crabs.
“It accelerates the mechanism by which contaminants accumulate in the food chain,” says Emma Teuten at the University of Plymouth, UK.
Teuten and her colleagues demonstrated in the lab that grains of plastic are much better than grains of sand or silt at adsorbing the common pollutant phenanthrene from water. Phenanthrene belongs to a family of hydrocarbons linked with cancers and respiratory problems, and plastic particles soak up 1000 times more of it than natural ones (Environmental Science & Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es071737s). “They kind of mop it up out of seawater like a sponge,” says Teuten.
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