Ocean microplastics can agglomerate land-based parasites, new research finds, potentially providing a pathway for these parasites to enter the marine food chain. The plastics may also act as miniature rafts, bringing parasites deeper into the ocean than currents alone. “The fact that this association occurs is telling us that microplastics can have a way of really altering the way that pathogens move,” says Karen Shapiro, a professor of pathology, microbiology, and immunology at the Univ. of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
Shapiro and her colleagues have long studied how land-based pathogens get into marine environments. In 2019, they reported that the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which was mysteriously infecting sea otters off the California coast, was coming from the feces of wild and feral cats living near waterways that drain to the sea. The researchers have also investigated how pathogens cling to “marine snow,” the biological rain that drifts down from the upper waters of the deep ocean to the depths below...
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