A study carried out an University College Cork has found that a small brine shrimp (Gammarus duebeni), which is common in Ireland, is capable of fragmenting microplastics into much smaller nanoplastics in as little as 96 hours (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/30/small-crustacean-can-fragment-microplastics-in-four-days-study-finds). This, unexpected finding is quite worrying as it had been thought that microplastics would remain relatively unchanged for extended periods in marine locations. Nanoplastics are so small that they can pass through the cell walls of any organism that ingests them. So, the shrimp will be encouraging the damaging spread of plastics into marine food chains. We might be getting our plastics back in our Dublin Bay prawns?
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