Seagrass in coastal areas act
as a natural sieve, collecting plastic into natural bundles of seagrass fiber called ‘Neptune Balls,’ according to research published in
Scientific Reports. The report states that seagrass in the Mediterranean alone may collect almost 900 million plastic items per year.
“We show that plastic debris in the seafloor can be trapped in seagrass remains, eventually leaving the marine environment through beaching,” Anna Sanchez-Vidal, lead author and a marine biologist at the University of Barcelona, told AFP. This “represents a continuous purge of plastic debris out of the sea,” Sanchez-Vidal added.
Widespread in shallow, coastal waters, seagrass trap and bind sediment particles that form the seabed. Researchers measured the amount of plastic debris found in seagrass litter for a year to understand how much plastic also ends up trapped in seagrass during this process. They studied one specific Mediterranean species