What is the effect of plastic on ecosystems?

What is the effect of plastic on ecosystems?

Butterfly effect describes how small changes can have non-linear impacts on complex systems – often compared to a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon. Microplastics have a similar result in ecosystems.

Impact of microplastics:

• Impact on soil, agriculture: Soil can be contaminated with microplastics through sources like composting, sewage waste, agricultural run-off, and mulching. This leads to poor reproductive success, retarded nutrient absorption and growth, increased antibiotic resistance, behavioral changes, and neurotoxicity. This will in turn have consequences on agriculture productivity or what is known as the green economy.
• Impact on keystone species: They play a crucial role in an ecosystem. Eg. polar bear, Asiatic elephant. They interact with microplastics and its chemical toxins
• Increased Bioaccumulation- It is the toxic build-up of chemicals as they travel up the food chain. It can have far-reaching implications across the biosphere. Thus, Terrestrial ecosystems are intrinsically linked to aquatic systems, as water, sediments and organisms move from one to the other, as do the contaminants.
• Impacts on bioindicators are organisms that are susceptible to small, adverse changes, and are used to study the environmental health. Eg: aquatic plants, various plankton and crustacean species, zebrafish etc. Deformed larvae, reduced mobility due to neurotoxicity, impaired immunity, and increased death rates etc. are some of the adverse impacts of microplastics.
• Marine snowfall: When plankton die or are consumed, they cause particles of carbon to sink from the surface to the deep ocean in a process known as marine snowfall. Some of this carbon is consumed by sea organisms along the way, some gets chemically broken down, but most of it reaches the deep ocean where it settles for hundreds or thousands of years.
• Plastisphere– Plankton interact with plastics in other ways too. Along with other microorganisms, they inhabit plastic surfaces, creating a plastisphere – an ecosystem of discarded waste in open waters. It is a mini-ecosystem in itself, with primary producers, grazers, predators, parasites, symbionts, and nutrient recyclers. Plastispheres may increase productivity in the otherwise unproductive ocean ecosystem, yet they serve as islands for harmful invasive microbes to travel across wide ranges, emitting greenhouse gases and ferrying antibiotic resistance genes along the way.