Short Wave - These Critters Call The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Home

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

For this second installment of the Sea Camp series, we explore the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's the largest of five gigantic garbage patches in the sea. These patches hang out at the nexus of the world's ocean currents, changing shape with the waves. These areas were long thought to have been uninhabited, the plastics and fishing gear too harmful to marine life. But researchers have uncovered a whole ecosystem of life in this largest collection of trash. Today, with the help of marine biologist Fiona Chong, we meet the tiny marine life that calls this place home.Also, exciting news!! WE HAVE A NEWSLETTER! It lets you go even deeper with the marine research each week of Sea Camp. Sign up here!Interested in hearing more sea stories? Tell us by emailing [e-mail]!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, surewaivers, it's Regina Barber. And Emily Kwong. Back with our second episode in our summer series, Sea Camp. Okay, M. Last week, we talked with our producer Hannah Chin about the interface of air and water. What do we have for today? Like, where are we going?

We're staying in the same place. We're just going to linger at the surface of the ocean a bit longer. But I wanted to visit one very famous type of ecosystem full of biodiversity and richness Okay, where is that? I am talking about a garbage patch. Trash as far as the eye can see. Garbage floating for miles in the ocean. It's an image you've probably seen pictures of,

affixed to an article about ocean pollution or climate change. It's an image most people turn away from, but not marine biologist Fiona Chong. A garbage patch is a floating collection of plastic debris. that came from land but has ended up in the oceans. And the plastic debris and the trash is carried there from land into the oceans by wind and ocean currents. And they kind of congregate there and they swell around. Fiona has stared into the soul of oceanic garbage more than most people as a PhD student at the University of Hull in the UK.

Now, garbage patches circulate around five different ocean gyres or huge rotating currents. Think water going around in a bathtub drain. Except, of course, the water never drains. There's one in the Indian Ocean, two in the Atlantic Ocean, and two in the Pacific Ocean. It's like a floating soup, made up of fishing nets, garbage, and peppered with micropastics. And the biggest one is the North Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Researchers estimate that it spans 1.6 million kilometers squared. Whenever somebody mentions a number like this, I struggle to pictures.

But what I found useful was that people said that it's two times the size of Texas and three times the size of France. A whole country of garbage. Just swirling around in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California, Fiona and a team of scientists have been studying not the trash, but the floating organisms called Neustin, who in spite of it all call the trash pile home. In their paper, they detail interesting creatures like the porpeda, a bright blue relative of the jellyfish. It is really a floating circular disk on the ocean surface, and they also have tentacles to catch things like plankton and crustaceans that they eat.

It's a vibrant and thriving ecosystem. And it's a discovery that complicates our understanding of ocean plastic. On the one hand, pollution is clearly harmful for wildlife. Plastic ensnars, marine mammals, poisons, fish. But on the other hand, garbage patches have become habitats. So if we're getting really good and maybe indiscriminate in the way that we're cleaning it up, then you also risk to remove these host systems that has its own food web and further extensions from the food web to other ecosystems too.

Today on the show, a look at the life in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and what's at stake for the local marine life when humans try to clean up their mess. I'm Emily Kwong and you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. So I want to talk a little bit about how scientists like yourself and your team of collaborators have identified a whole host of life in the North Pacific Garbage Patch, a whole ecosystem, really. What are some of the species that you've found there? Yeah, so we'll start with the ones that we've seen quite a lot of. So we've got this organism called the by the wind sailor, Vallela Vlela. Vlella, Vela. Yeah, it's quite satisfying to say.

It's this floating jellyfish-like creature, but it's not a jellyfish. It's a hydroid. That's blue in color with a sail. floating above the surface. And it catches the wind and it therefore can move following the wind and quite far as a result. So, yeah, they're translucent looking a bit of blue with tentacles underneath them to catch the food and the sail above to catch the wind. Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking at this organism and it does.

It looks like a little boat with a sand. sail. Yeah. Popping up. Mm-hmm. But it's all it looks, it looks all

very squishy and soft. It is squishy and soft. Have you poked it? I have. Actually, in my experience,

I've found them on the beaches because they get washed the shore because, you know, they follow the wind. What else is there? What else is there?

So another one that we see a lot of is Popita, what we call Blue Button. So they're very closely related to vanilla.

So it's also a hydroid. And it is really a floating circular disk on the ocean surface. And they also have tentacles to catch things like plankton and crustaceans that they eat. And very interestingly, with Porpita, there's been observations where they have created a symbiosis, like a partnership with small juvenile fish. In this case, that means the small fish is hiding under this poppeta. imagine that you've got like a little umbrella on top of your head at all times

and that's probably because the poppeta has stinging tentacles which protect the fish from anything that might come at it and all of this is happening in a very small scale like popita are mostly centimetres in diameter and they've even shown that if you remove the poppita from the fish it would be stressed. And then when they gave the the propita partner back,

they were much happier. And they were also shown to, you know, actually be able to tell which was their propita. So the scientists introduced other paupita to that fish that they got.

And they didn't want to go to that. The little fish were like, that's not my porpeta. I want my porpeta. Yeah. Basically, which is amazing. I mean, it's not only a pretty menagerie, but what is also true is that it's a food web.

Like certain creatures are eating other creatures. Who eats who in the North Pacific Garbage Patch? Yeah. So the gentina snail is actually a predator. So it predates on the fellella that I've mentioned as well as the blue button. So these northern species, they actually can't swim and they float with the currents and the wind. So they really rely on there being a high-grain. concentration of this whole system so that they could eat each other. Another really,

charismatic, pretty newstone that's a predator is the Glaucus, Atlantis, which is the Blue Sea Dragon. The Blue Sea Dragon is actually a slug, and they also prey on other newstone, and in particular, the Glaucus actually shows a preference for the Manor War, but they would also eat for Lela and Popita. And so actually, within the surface Newston ecosystem, it is a food web on its own, somewhat self-sustaining. But we also know that other non-Newston organisms eat the Newston, such as the ocean sunfish. We know that seabirds come in and also eat the surface organisms. as well as sea turtles.

So they definitely are preyed on by much bigger things as well as being eaten by each other within the Houston ecosystem. Yeah. There's clearly so much life on this garbage patch. Like not even a little bit, but a lot. And one thing that your research found was in looking at the concentrations of organisms, there were more in the middle than on the edges. Why is that?

Yeah, the currents really just concentrate them into the middle of the patch where there's a relative kind of a stable patch in the middle of the gyre. And what difference does that make to the life that lives there, that they're getting closer to each other as the gyre moves in? So them being in a higher concentration, you know, allows them to feed because they actually need to touch each other to eat each other. But also, there are evidence of them just being able to, you know, spawn. Right. But also they need to bump into each other to maize. Fascinating. Wow. So this is a real ecosystem. But let's not forget where it's happening. Of course, it's happening in this garbage patch.

And we know how dangerous microplastics and garbage is for bigger marine life, for entanglement, animals ingesting. garbage. How has this research affected your views on ocean cleanup of the patch? Yeah, so it's definitely not a good thing. It is the same that us humans, you know, have such large impacts in the ocean that, you know, our footprint is so far out. You know, plastic being in the patch could be harmful for other marine organisms. Like we've mentioned we have sea turtles, seabirds, and the sunfish coming in, eating our Newston ecosystem. So when they take these mouthfuls, they would ingest plastics too, like you've said. So if we're getting really good and maybe indiscriminate in the way that we're cleaning it up,

then you also risk to remove these whole systems that has its own food web and further extensions from the food web to other ecosystems too, which suggests to me and my colleagues that there needs to be better ways of cleaning up the ocean or better yet, we just should curb it at the source. We shouldn't let the plastic and the plastic debris and the trash go out at all. That is probably quite difficult. But we should try it. If the whole world could listen to you, talk about this garbage patch, what would be your recommendation?

So I think on a day-to-day basis, you could definitely be more aware of your footprint, your own trash. And a better waste management system needs to be in place for countries that are really big polluters. if there were any kind of cleanup effort, I really think that they should be closer to shore. I mean, that's probably better because it is on land and closer to us. At least the carbon footprint wouldn't be as high. But again, that probably comes with a lot of other problems, such as there is life in the rivers.

And how do you make sure that you can differentiate that from the river trash? the bycatch problem yeah and finally actually the fishing industry is a big poloosa of the open ocean the ghost nets so the fishing nets that are maybe damaged and therefore like just floating in the middle of the sea those are actually what are found a lot in the middle of the the great pacific garbage patch so yeah they definitely also need to be held accountable. So changes to the fishing industry, changes to where we prioritize

cleanup, and changes to how we dispose of garbage in the first place. Fiona Chung, it's been so good to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on Shortwave. Thank you. Emily, thank you for the story about life forms that live in our trash. You're welcome, Gina.

And you can check out our episode page to see pictures of these truly stunning trash creatures. Shortwavers, before we head out, we're excited to tell you that we have made a brand new thing. A special sparkly sea camp newsletter. This is a limited edition newsletter. It's a five-part series. In each issue, we're going to explore a different vertical zone of the ocean, dive into some research

and highlight a cute, quirky, or crucial ocean critter from that zone. And there are pictures. And a game. It's one more way we at shortwave aim to infuse joy and wonder. into your day. Producer Burley McCoy has poured her heart and soul into this project, so please sign up and share it with your friends.

To register, visit npr.org slash seecamp and enter your email. You'll start getting newsletters once a week. That link again is npr.org slash see camp. This episode was produced by Carly Rubin and Burley McCoy. It was edited and fact-checked by our

showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Maggie Luthor and Jimmy Keely were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong. and I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave and Seacamp from NPR.