Video shows suspect setting Toronto-area barbershop on fire
Video of a suspect lighting a Richmond Hill barbershop on fire earlier this week has been released by police.
Marine creatures and plants typically found in coastal regions have found new ways to survive in the open ocean by colonizing plastic pollution, scientists say.
A new study, published on Thursday in the journal Nature Communications, has found coastal marine species inhabiting floating trash after catching a ride to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, also known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” hundreds of miles out to sea.
"The issues of plastic go beyond just ingestion and entanglement," Linsey Haram, lead author of the article and fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a news release. "It’s creating opportunities for coastal species’ biogeography to greatly expand beyond what we previously thought was possible."
Gyres of plastic form when currents deliver plastic pollution from the coasts into regions where rotating currents trap the floating objects in place and they can accumulate over time. There are at least five plastic-infested gyres around the globe. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, located between California and Hawaii, has the most floating plastic with an estimated 79 million kilograms floating in a region over 1.5 million square kilometres.
Until now, confirmed sightings of coastal species on plastic in the open ocean were rare. Scientists first began suspecting these species could use plastic to survive out in the ocean for long periods of time after the 2011 tsunami in Japan when they discovered that nearly 300 species had rafted all the way across the Pacific on debris over the course of several years.
"The open ocean has not been habitable for coastal organisms until now," Greg Ruiz, a senior scientist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and co-author of the study. "Partly because of habitat limitation—there wasn’t plastic there in the past—and partly, we thought, because it was a food desert."
Plastic is providing the habitat, but Ruiz says scientists are still trying to figure out the species are finding food, such as whether they drift into hot spots or if the plastic acts like a reef and attracts nutrition sources.
Now that they know coastal species can exist far into the ocean, scientists are wondering how their presence could impact an environment already inhabited by sea creatures who also use the plastic as a habitat.
"Coastal species are directly competing with these oceanic rafters," Haram said. "They’re competing for space. They’re competing for resources. Those interactions are very poorly understood."
The discovery also raises questions about the possibility of coastal species invading regions where they are foreign. This has already been seen with tsunami debris from 2011 that carried organisms from Japan to North America.
"Those other coastlines are not just urban centres,” Ruiz said. “That opportunity extends to more remote areas, protected areas, Hawaiian Islands, national parks, marine protected areas."
The study authors say they still don’t know how common these ocean communities of coastal species are, if they can continue to sustain themselves or if they exist outside of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. But with the world’s increasing dependence on plastic and more frequent storms as a result of climate change, they expect more plastic will be pushed out into the sea and for colonies of coastal species in the ocean to grow.
Video of a suspect lighting a Richmond Hill barbershop on fire earlier this week has been released by police.
A New Brunswick woman suffering from sarcoidosis, a disease that limits your lung capacity, is in need of a double lung transplant.
The adorable trio of child actors from the 1993 classic comedy 'Mrs. Doubtfire,' which starred the late and great Robin Williams, are all grown up and looking back on their seminal time together.
York Regional Police say they are continuing to search for a suspect in an auto theft investigation who was captured on video running over a police officer in Toronto last month.
It’s the first flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule with a crew on board, a pair of NASA pilots who will check out the spacecraft during the test drive and a weeklong stay at the space station.
A source close to singer Britney Spears tells CNN that the pop star is 'home and safe' after she had a 'major fight' with her boyfriend on Wednesday night at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood.
Pius Suter scored with 1:39 left and the Vancouver Canucks advanced to the second round of the NHL playoffs with a 1-0 victory over the Nashville Predators on Friday night in Game 6.
A Chinese truck driver was praised in local media Saturday for parking his vehicle across a highway and preventing more cars from tumbling down a slope after a section of the road in the country's mountainous south collapsed and killed at least 48 people.
TD Bank Group could be hit with more severe penalties than previously expected, says a banking analyst after a report that the investigation it faces in the U.S. is tied to laundering illicit fentanyl profits.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.