Barnacles Plus Plastic Trash Make Rafts for Ocean Animals

If you wanted to travel from Japan to California, you could do worse than to hitch a ride on a barnacle-covered buoy. Or maybe a barnacle-covered refrigerator or chunk of foam. Barnacles are turning all kinds of ocean trash into cozy habitats for animals at sea. They might even help some of those animals reach distant shores and become dangerous invasive species. Flora and fauna have always sailed the sea on rafts such as pieces of wood or pumice, or matted plants. Without flotation devices, some species could never have reached places like the Hawaiian islands. But natural rafts have a limited lifespan before they biodegrade. Plastic objects made by humans, on the other hand, can survive in the ocean for ages. "Plastics littered in our world's oceans provide an unprecedented opportunity for rafting organisms," says University of Florida biologist Mike Gil. Plastic ocean trash is increasing all the time, ...