Garbage Patches

There are now at least five major garbage patches in the world's oceans, and much of that trash is plastic. But last month [researchers:foreigners] said they can only account for one percent of the plastic they'd expect to find in the oceans. So, where'd the rest of it go?Well, animals eat some of it. Plastic has been found in turtles, seabirds, fish, plankton, shellfish, even [bottom-feeding:baby] invertebrates. But there's another way sea creatures might be accumulating plastic: by sucking up tiny plastic [particles:items] with their siphons and gills.[Researchers:Scientists] added common shore crabs - Carcinus maenas - to tanks of seawater containing millions of tiny plastic particles, just 10 microns in diameter. After 16 hours, all the crabs had plastic lodged in their gills. And the particles stuck around for up to three weeks, too. The results are in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.The longer plastic sits in an animal, researchers say, the better the chances it will travel up the food chain. Meaning all our plastic waste could come back to bite us - or rather be bitten by us.