The fishermen of Puerto Morelos, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, danger their lives each time they head out to sea to fish or dive for lobsters. Their bounty depends on luck, because the climate usually makes it unattainable to exit, whereas on different days the hooks they solid come again empty. These employees set out day by day to seek out the most effective lobsters potential for the prosperous vacationers who come to the area, whereas they and their households, reduce off from lots of the advantages of tourism growth, get by on fish stuffed with microplastics.
Omar Oslet Rivera-Garibay, a researcher on the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology on the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, documented the lives of those fishermen in a latest examine. He and his colleagues report that whereas members of the Pescadores de Puerto Morelos fishing cooperative harvest and promote high-value seafood merchandise to fulfill vacationers’ appetites, they’re left with solely the fish caught close to the city’s seashores for their very own consumption. It has little industrial worth and is contaminated with tiny plastic fragments.
As a part of their analysis, Rivera-Garibay and the staff captured 424 fish from 29 totally different species utilizing the identical strategies because the cooperative’s companions. All had been dissected, and their digestive tracts eliminated and examined. Contaminants had been present in 57 % of the fish, with over a thousand microplastic particles recovered. The analysis famous that “fish caught with handlines in shallow waters near the coast had significantly more microplastics in their intestines than those caught in deeper waters.”
Handline fishing is a standard methodology that has lengthy been used within the shallow waters close to Puerto Morelos. It consists merely of a line and a hook, and can be utilized to catch fish comparable to croaker, which could be eaten however have little industrial worth. Two different strategies are used to catch extra precious species. A línea de rosario (“rosary line”) consists of a number of traces with a sequence of branched hooks, and is utilized in deeper waters, about 20 nautical miles from the coast. It’s used to catch snapper, grouper, and pigfish. Lobster is caught by free divers utilizing spearguns.
The least-prized fish, containing extra microplastics, are taken residence by fishermen to feed their households; the high-value fish are bought to vacationers right here within the state of Quintana Roo, which annually receives greater than 20 million guests who spend greater than $20 billion. Quintana Roo is the Mexican state with the very best income from tourism, however that doesn’t trickle all the way down to the underside of the inhabitants pyramid. As of 2020, 42.6 % of the inhabitants in Puerto Morelos lived in poverty or excessive poverty, in line with knowledge from Mexico’s Secretariat of Economic system.
Rivera-Garibay highlights the hazards of microplastics in fish. “These species are consumed by humans. Microplastics contain potentially hazardous chemicals, such as plastic monomers and additives, and they absorb toxic contaminants from the environment, like harmful microbes and algae that may cause illnesses in humans,” Rivera-Garibay says. “However, there is still no solid evidence that the safety of seafood is compromised by microplastics. A greater understanding of the impacts of microplastics on seafood is urgently needed.”
