Today, one of our major environmental issues is plastic waste. Hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic waste that ends up in the nature and pollute our oceans and threaten the animal life on earth. (World Animal Protection, 23/11-17) In this text I am going to focus on which way this environment issue, plastic in our oceans, affect us. Especially, how does all plastic waste in the oceans affect marine animal life?

There are many different types of plastic in the oceans. Approximately 80% of all plastic that lands in the oceans originally comes from land. The most common is plastic bags, food containers, and especially fishing nets, other types of fishing equipment and microplastics. It was calculated that approximately 52 trillion microplastic particles floated around, which has an estimated weight of around 93 000 - 236 000 ton. Ca 640 000 ton of ghost nets, that is lost, torn nets that was left behind was floating around as well (World Animal Protection, 23/11-17). These plastics are floating around in our oceans and creates deathtraps for the marine animal life, it is estimated that around 100 000 animals are either killed or suffer in some way because of serious injuries caused by plastics yearly (World Animal Protection, no date).

Microplastics is an environmental issue the human population has known about for 50 years. It is also something scientists have warned about, but our lack of knowledge has limited us. Scientists knows so little about the influence of microplastics and in what amount exists in our oceans. Because of the lack of previous research of microplastics influence on the oceans and especially the marine animal life the scientists still don't know about the consequences that appears (Stockholms universitet, Löf 05/08-17). Since this is a well-known environment threat scientist have started intense research the last couple of years. .

During different experiments they increased the amount of microplastics of what has previously been measured in marine environment, but also other experiments where they reduced the amount instead. During these experiments' scientists discovered that microplastics in general leads to reduced survival because of impaired reproduction and food intake at primarily zooplankton, oysters, sea lobster where nutrient intake is reduced. They also found toxic effects on the liver of fishes. We are still missing knowledge about how it all effects specific species and what the increasing amount of microplastics entails, if the problem with microplastics is happening in conjunction with another type of environment issue/problem (Stockholms universitet, 06-2017).

Today, scientists still don't have knowledge regarding the amount of microplastics in our oceans. Despite that, the consumption, plastic supplies and substances containing plastic articles isn't reducing. This is reason enough to limit the plastic supply with political assistance. Ocean living animals are exposed to plastic, no matter what position in the food web/nutritional chain they have. All kinds of species, everything from animal planktons, fishes, birds, marine living mammals etc. can get exposed to plastic particles by gills, plastic can be mistaken for food or it is already inside their food. In other words, microplastics can transfer from prey to predator. (Stockholms universitet, 06-2017).

As a conclusion, even though we lack knowledge about microplastics and their negative impact, it is experimentally evident that they have a huge negative impact. We can prove that microplastics affects the marine animal lives survival, even though the amount of impact is still unknown. It is also clear that this problem is something that was caused by us humans. The problem appeared because of our enormous amount of consumption of plastics and other supplies containing plastic particles, but also that humans all around the world contributes to debris. The garbage that is thrown in nature has a possibility to get to the ocean as final destination.