STUDIES ON PLASTIC POLLUTION AND IT’S IMPACT ON BIOLOGY OF COMMERCIALLY IMPORTANT FISHES OFF MANGALURU COAST
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Date
2019
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KARNATAKA VETERINARY, ANIMAL AND FISHERIES SCIENCES UNIVERSITY, BIDAR
Abstract
The issue of plastic pollution in the marine environment has already created a menace across all the coastal areas of the world. Monitoring is crucial to assess the efficacy of measures implemented to reduce the abundance of plastic debris. Sources of plastic marine debris found on the selected 3 stations along the Mangaluru coast were estimated. Samples were collected from 5 quadrats of 2 × 2 m for each station from January 2019 to July 2019. The total number of plastic debris varied between months and between stations with 70-224 nos. This has lead to a much larger concern regrading the presence of microplastics (MPs) (plastic debris <5mm) and its ingestion by the marine fauna.
This study focuses, for the first time, on the presence of microplastics in stomach contents of 8 commerically important fishes along the Mangaluru coast, India. A total of 240 fishes were examined out of which 46 (19.16%) guts had microplastics in them. Microplastics found were of two types, fragments and fibres. The total number of microplastic found were 54, out which 87% (47) were fibres and 13% (7) were fragment, their size ranged between 0.1mm – 3.7mm. The presence of secondary microplastics in the fish has shown that the microplastic pollution of the area is mainly due to the coastal plastic pollution. These results are very important to crub plastic and microplastic pollution around the coastline, and public awareness of the harmful effects of these microplastics is needed