The spatial distribution of microplastic in the sands of a coral reef island in the South China Sea: Comparisons of the fringing reef and atoll

Differential enrichment and physiological impacts of ingested microplastics in scleractinian corals in situ

“…Previous studies have revealed the distribution of microplastics in coral reef ecosystem and the negative impact of microplastics on coral health in the laboratory (Okubo et al, 2018;Reichert et al, 2018;Huang et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019). However, little is known about the effect of microplastics on the scleractinian corals in natural coral reef ecosystems.…”

“…High levels of microplastics have been reported in the coral reef ecosystems from different regions, e.g. the Rameswaram Coral Island (Vidyasakar et al, 2018), the Great Barrier Reef (Jensen et al, 2019), Maldives (Imhof et al, 2017;Saliu et al, 2018), and the South China Sea Huang et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019). The microplastics detected in the reef environments were mainly polyethylene, polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate in component composition, and predominantly transparent or blue in color.…”

Why do mesophotic coral ecosystems have to be protected?

“…In addition, the offshore location of MCEs may mean that they are subject to less anthropogenic pressure from chronic pollution from coastal cities, physical effects (e.g., marine debris, anchoring, benthic infrastructure), overfishing, and high loads of sediments and turbidity (Abaya et al, 2018;Smith et al, 2019). However, in shallower continental shelves and lagoon atoll MCEs can occur close to the human populations, where they are affected by coastal runoff (e.g., plastics, microplastics and extreme floods; Soares et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019), abandoned fishing gears (Ballesteros et al, 2018), chemical contaminants (e.g., polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organochlorine pesticides, and polychlorinated biphenyls [PCBs]; Cai et al, 2016;Jafarabadi et al, 2017Jafarabadi et al, , 2019a, labile dissolved organic carbon (Bednarz et al, 2020), metals (Ricolleau et al, 2019;Schyff et al, 2020), and fishing activities (Rocha et al, 2018;Soares et al, 2019). Furthermore, persistent organic pollutants such as PCBs can have detrimental effects on ecological systems such as MCEs owing to their high toxicity, lipophilic properties, and widespread dispersal in the marine environment (Jafarabadi et al, 2019a(Jafarabadi et al, , 2019b.…”

Microplastics in mangroves and coral reef ecosystems: a review

“…Among the detected particles, fibrous forms were abundant in the samples, determining that riverine discharges were one of the potential sources for inshore contamination. The spatial distribution of microplastics in sand samples of a fringing reef, and an atoll of coral reef islands of South China Sea, was analysed by Zhang et al (2019). Red coloured polypropylene microplastics of size less than 1 mm were detected in larger quantities than other types and ocean currents, water exchange rates, etc., were the major factors responsible for the deposition of microplastics in these samples, showing an average microplastic concentration of 40 ± 4 items/kg to 610 ± 11 items/ kg.…”