Paper indicates water-born microplastics are altering mussel behaviors

The chemicals being released into the oceans by microplastics – the incredibly small particles left behind as plastics break down – could be causing major changes in how mussels behave.

Authors of a paper recently published in the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) journal “Ecological Applications,” observed mussels along the coasts of South Africa and France in order to gather their data, according to a post on the ESA website. The authors spent low-tide periods painstakingly counting the microplastic particles left on the sand, finding as many as 950 per square meter.

The authors took mussels from those beaches back to the lab, acclimated them to plastics-free water, then reintroduced the mussels to water laced with plastics, according to the post. While the different species reacted to the plastic-laced water in varied fashions, all of them changed their behaviors in response.

“Mussels are ecosystem engineers whose dense, bumpy beds form habitat for other species and essentially become part of the landscape itself,” the post states. “Changes in motility and grip, like those that [Laurent] Seuront and his colleagues observed, could therefore influence other communities and ecosystems in important ways.”