Microplastics – Transfer through Freshwater Ecosystem Food Webs

According to a May 22, 2020 report published online in the journal Global Change Biology https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15139 “… As a rapidly accelerating expression of global change, plastics now occur extensively in freshwater ecosystems, yet there is barely any evidence of their transfer through food webs … we used a field study of free‐living Eurasian dippers (Cinclus cinclus), to test the hypotheses that (1) plastics are transferred from prey to predators in rivers, (2) plastics contained in prey are transferred by adults to altricial offspring during provisioning and (3) plastic concentrations in faecal and regurgitated pellets from dippers increase with urbanization … As some of the first evidence revealing that plastic is now being transferred through freshwater food webs, and between adult passerines and their offspring, these data emphasize the need to appraise the potential ecotoxicological consequences of increasing plastic pollution …” #MicroPlastics #PlasticWaste #SingleUsePlastic