'Flesh-eating' bacteria have been found thriving on seaweed blooms and plastic pollution in the open Caribbean Ocean, and researchers worry the potential pathogens could come back to bite us.
species, some of which are undescribed, happily living their best life on waste is far from good news. It's yet another potential vector for human disease that experts have not accounted for. Even worse, the floating habitat isn't going anywhere. In fact, it seems to be expanding in size and washing up on our coastlines like never before.
The recent analysis from Florida Atlantic University included samples of ocean plastic collected in the Caribbean and Sargasso Seas in 2012 and 2013, as well as samples of brown seaweed, calledbacteria, some of which have never been seen before.In experiments in the lab, the open-ocean bacteria clung to and colonized plastic samples with alarming efficiency.marine biologist Tracy Mincer from Florida Atlantic University.
"We also found that there are attachment factors that microbes use to stick to plastics, and it is the same kind of mechanism that pathogens use." A graph depicting the study's collection and analysis of bacteria in the Sargasso Sea. (Mincer et al.,
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