THERE’S THE PLASTIC waste we can see—bottles, bags, discarded fishing nets, and all manner of other objects littering shorelines and bobbing in oceans. And then there’s the plastic waste we can’t see: microplastics, whittled by sun, wind, and waves into bits so small that some are visible only under a microscope. Scientists are just beginning to understand the impact these particles are having on fish, the food chain, and ultimately, us.
For this month’s story about microplastics—part of National Geographic’s Planet or Plastic? initiative to reduce plastic waste—photographer David Liittschwager documented the ubiquity of plastics in ocean water samples. Writer Laura Parker’s reporting took her to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Honolulu, where oceanographer Jamison Gove and fish biologist Jonathan Whitney study microplastics in the slicks where larval fish spend their first days of life.
RELATED: ANIMALS IN A WORLD OF PLASTIC
Empty plastic and glass containers wash ashore and litter the habitat of a marine iguana on Ecuador’s Santa Cruz Island. Marine iguanas can be found only on the Galápagos Islands.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TUI DE ROY, MINDEN PICTURES/NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A pair of curious rhesus macaques inspect a discarded plastic bottle outside the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu, Nepal.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETE RYAN, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A black-footed albatross crunches down on plastic garbage on the Leeward Islands of Hawaii. Seabirds depend on the ocean for sustenance, and the ocean is littered with plastic pollution.
PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANS LANTING, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A Laysan albatross and a chick rest near a mound of regurgitated trash. Some birds with smaller gizzards can’t throw up undigestible plastic, so they’re more susceptible to plastic pollution.
PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANS LANTING, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
