Pollution by and fibers is a global threat that reaches the most remote regions in the world, also to marine ecosystems in the. However, it is unknown how it impacts the marine food chain. Microant has launched it, a project financed by the State Research Agency within the framework of the Spanish Antarctic Campaign 2024-2025, to discover by how microplastic pollution impacts the food chain. The work studies the water, hundred stomach samples of small fish and marine fauna droppings. From plankton organisms such as Krill to predators such as penguins, seals and marine wolves.
The main objective of the project, which is carried out simultaneously in the Antarctic Peninsula, the north of Patagonia and the Argentine Tierra del Fuego, is to clear unknowns such as the following.: Do microplastics influence species that feed near the? Is the amount of contaminants accumulated throughout the Antarctic food chain? It is directed by Professor Lluís Cardona, the Faculty of Biology and the Institute for Biodiversity Research (Irbio) of the UB and in the Antarctic campaign the researchers Manel Gazo (UB, Irbio), Odei García-Garín (UDG), Damian Vales (Cesimar-Conicet, Argentina) and Natalia Paso-Viola (UNTDF-Conicet, Argentina) participate in the Antarctic campaign. The work was developed aboard the oceanographic ship Hesperides of the Spanish Navy, sampling along the Antarctic Peninsula and then in the base Juan Carlos I, on the island of Livingston, in the South Shetland archipelago, in January and February.
In Antarctica, a theoretically protected continent as a nature reserve and enshrined to scientific research, since 2024 the avian flu affects penguins and seals, with the risk that reaches the human being; Hence they had to take precautions. They dressed with individual protective equipment (EPIS), monkeys, masks, glasses and gloves that were incinerated daily to protect themselves from viruses and minimize the contamination of the samples they collected.
Lluís Cardona explains that “the microplastics that reach Antarctica end up in the deepest areas of the polar through the biological activity of marine species.” and small animals that adhere to plastic surfaces (biofouling) They increase their density and fall to the background, ”he details. On the other hand, zooplankton is able to ingest and encapsulate microplastics in excrement.
“These two processes facilitate that the plastic particles sink at a higher speed,” says Cardona. “This suggests that, in the same ecosystem and similar trophic level, the benthic carnivores of the seabed may be more exposed to the potential threat of microplastics than pelagic, small fish and krill living in the water column,” says the teacher. This is one of the unknowns that you want to reveal to know the ecological impact of plastic particles on the ecosystems of the southern ocean.
Among the three investigated areas, some 1,500 samples have been obtained from a dozen, which will help decipher how plastic pollutants move in Antarctic food networks. Those studied in Antarctica are the penguins of Adelia, Papua and Barbijo; the Cangrejera, Weddell and Leopardo seals; The Fine Antarctic Wolf and three species of fish, in addition to the Krill, a tiny marine crustacean similar to shrimp that is part of the zooplankton, vital for the feeding of whales, seals and penguins.
Antarctica samples were left frozen in the Hesperides And they will arrive this July at its base port, where they will be collected in refrigerator vehicles. There will be results in March 2026. “There is a lot of analysis work,” says Cardona. They will analyze the water, krill stomachs and fish and excrement of seals and penguins, and the isotopic carbon and nitrogen signal in the excrement, to understand its position in the trophic chain and relate it to the presence or not, of microplastics. “Until now isolated pieces of the puzzle are known but we lack an overview of the distribution of microplastics in the ecosystems of the southern ocean,” says Cardona, which highlights: “That there are microplastics is known, our work will allow to find out its distribution in Antarctica and. If in the three sampling points, which covers a very wide region of about 2,000 kilometers We will understand that the process that operates is the same and would be a very important discovery. ”
Domestic washing machines from which fibers with plastic come out
So far it has been discovered that the most frequent microplastics are fibers from clothing. They can measure five millimeters, but most are between 200 and 500 microns. They need to be seen in a microscope. Through a spectrometry, the light spectrum emitted by each particle is determined and allows to know what material it is. Its main emitter is the water of the washing machines, which ends at sea. As in Antarctica you cannot tend, dryer is used and its waste can also end at sea. Apart from, there are the fibers that emerge from the presence of the increasingly frequent tourists. For example, single -use bottles or plastics. This is another aspect that worries.
An international agreement, he, -Spain is one of the 29 countries with the right to vote -only allows two economic activities: fishing, with very strict norms and tourism, in regulation roads because it is still a recent phenomenon. Two decades ago he received less than 20,000 tourists a year, but in 2024 he reached 125,000. Although it measures the Iberian Peninsula 26 times, visitors do not have access everywhere and end up in the same places. For experts the Diffusion on social networks has trusted a tourism “with inappropriate behaviors that can introduce invasive species or damage the ecosystem.” Large cruise tourists cannot disembark, but they also generate a large volume of sewage of sinks and gray of showers and washing machines, which “are a large entry of contamination and microplastics if they are not managed correctly,” says the biologist.
