Shayle Matsuda

You hear these stories about straws getting stuck on turtles' noses or animals getting caught in plastic bags or eating plastic bags, thinking that they're jellyfish or other kinds of food.

And so those are a big problem.

However, what we've learned recently is that

The plastics, as they start to actually break down, so they're not necessarily visible to the naked eye, these microplastics are having a huge impact on these lower trophic levels.

A lot of these, the plankton are eating the plastics, and the larger animals are eating those plastics.

And there have been some studies that are looking at, are corals eating these plastics as well?

And what does that mean, right?

Yeah.

There's no nutritional value.

If you can't expel those, then all of a sudden, there's something inside of your gut that's taking up space where nutrition could be.

And so these are huge, huge problems that are also, unfortunately, global.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like I was telling you earlier, when you see a coral bleaching event and you're like, so many of these corals died, there's all those corals that didn't die.

The corals themselves are... There are some winners.

There are some survivors.

And that's really exciting because without any intervention from us, there are organisms, there are individuals that are already able to withstand these.

You look at an environment like the Red Sea, which is...

on average, way warmer than anywhere else, and corals that are living up to temperatures that can't here.

And the difference is that this has happened over geologic time, whereas we are speeding things up.

And can these animals keep up for that?