Projeto de pesquisa

A recent study estimates that trillions of plastics are floating all over the oceans (Eriksen et al., 2014), representing one of the most important threats for marine ecosystems together with global warming and ocean acidification. Although Antarctica has been historically seen as pristine region, even this remote area could be reached by plastic debris crossing the Antarctic Polar Front. Macroplastics 1 cm have been surveyed by sight in the Southern Ocean since 1980s (Ivar do Sul et al., 2011) and despite the low densities, their effective presence and high persistence (Barnes et al., 2009) mightpose a serious concern for these fragile marine ecosystems. Up to date, no information is available on micro 5mm and nanoplastics 100nm in Antarctica resulting from weathering and fragmentation processes of macrodebris despite the presence of microplastics around Australia and the remote Southern Ocean Island of South Georgia have been recently reported (Reisser et al., 2013). Smaller plastic pieces including nanoplastics can be easily ingested and accumulated by small invertebrates, leading to trophic transfer (Boerger et al., 2010; Cole et al., 2013) and then reaching top-predators (e.g. fishes and penguins). Sunspension feeders as well as bottom grazer, which occupy a large portion of Antarctica biodiversity (Brey et al., 1995), are the primary biological targets of micro and nanoplastics, being exposed both to polymeric beads in suspension and to the fraction in sediments (Matranga and Corsi, 2012; Manzo et al., 2013; Della Torre et al., 2014). Considering that Antarctic marine ecosystems are characterised by an extremely short trophic web, small perturbations at the lower trophic levels can heavily affect the whole ecosystems.