In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of the largest garbage patches in the world, researchers have discovered surprising traces of life that thrive on floating plastic.
November 30, 2025, 5:24 p.mNovember 30, 2025, 5:48 p.m
Garbage floats in the ocean, forming huge garbage patches. One of the largest is the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the Pacific. Tens of thousands of tons of plastic parts are now collecting there that are so robust that they float in the sea for years. The region lies in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a vast rotating current system between California and Hawaii.
The environmental organization “The Ocean Cleanup” is cleaning a small part of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” with huge nets.Image: imago
Among all the plastic waste, researchers are increasingly finding creatures that have built their own ecosystem in the huge waste vortex earth.com reported.
They call this community of creatures “neopelagic” communities – where “neo” means new and “pelagic” refers to life in the open sea. Thanks to the countless floating plastic islands, creatures that actually live on the coast can suddenly survive in the open sea.
For a long time, coastal waters and the open sea were viewed as separate habitats. Coastal species were thought to remain on rocks, piers and shorelines, while pelagic species belonged in the open sea. However, in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” these habitats mix.
The environmental organization “The Ocean Cleanup” fishes more than 100,000 kilograms of plastic from the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.Image: imago
Crabs in the Pacific garbage
To find out more about life in the waste vortex, a team of researchers fished out more than 100 plastic objects from the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. Bottles, buoys, boxes, nets, ropes and buckets.
Back in the laboratory, they found a wide variety of creatures, including barnacles, crabs, amphipods, bryozoans, hydroid polyps and sea anemones.
In total, they identified 46 different invertebrate species from six large animal groups. Of these 46 species, 37 were coastal species and 9 were pelagic species – meaning around 80 percent of the diversity on the debris came from organisms from coastal habitats.
Life cycles on plastic
The team looked for evidence of reproduction and growth to find out whether the various coastal organisms are just temporary passengers on the plastic or whether they can complete their entire life cycles there.
A large variety of animals now live in plastic waste.Image: imago
They looked for breeding females – females that carried eggs or young – among several groups of crustaceans such as amphipods and crabs and they found them. They also discovered reproductive structures in hydroids. The researchers also measured individual animals and noted the size differences on each plastic object.
In some sea anemones and amphipods, they discovered tiny juveniles, medium-sized and adults, all living together on the same plastic surface.
This pattern suggests that new generations are growing up directly on the plastic islands, rather than all arriving from the coast at the same time.
Plastic pollution is not just a waste problem. It changes marine habitats and gives coastal organisms the chance to survive, reproduce and spread over long distances.
The full study was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution published. (fake)