The abundance, characteristics and diversity of microplastics in the South China Sea: Observation around three remote islands

Highlights

• A high abundance of floating MPs was found in the southern South China Sea.

• Transparent film and fiber were predominant in water and organisms, respectively.

• 84.7% of floating MPs and 54.5% of MPs in vivo belonged to PP and PE.

• Characteristics of MP in organisms were different from those of inshore ones.

Abstract

Surrounded by emerging markets with considerable plastic consumption, the South China Sea has been a focus area of microplastic research. A survey on the floating microplastics (>0.3 mm) and microplastics ingested by fish and mollusks was conducted around three remote islands here. Compared with the results from several previous studies, a high abundance of floating microplastics (with a median of 1.9 × 10⁵ items/km² or 0.7 items/m³) was observed, revealing another “hot spot” for microplastics. Polyolefin, especially polypropylene, was the main component. The diversity index and evenness index were calculated and evaluated based on the composition of microplastics. The characteristic peaks of Raman spectra concerning pigmented microplastics were provided. Transparent sheets/films were predominant in the water sample, which was quite different from a similar study in this sea area (8.9% for film), and only 16.4% of floating microplastics (>0.3 mm) were fibers/lines, implying that the main sources of floating microplastics (>0.3 mm) might be household/agricultural consumption activities. The transparent fiber/line was also dominant in organisms. It is suggested that the main sources of microplastics ingested by organisms might be both fabric fibers and fishing/aquaculture.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Microplastics / Coral reefs / Abundance / Diversity / Characteristics

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Acknowledgements

The study was supported by National Key Research & Development Program of China (Grant No. 2019YFD0901101), and China Blue Bay Remediation Action Plan. The authors are grateful to Professor Niu Wentao and Dr. Yu Shuangen for their help with samples collection and Professor Du Jianguo for his help with species identification. The authors would like to thank NMDIS for developing (cora.nmdis.org.cn) the CORA data sets used in this study.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-021-1443-1 and is accessible for authorized users.

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