You may not be wearing an insulated wetsuit like Pacific swimmer Ben Lecomte,
but part of the outfit you’re wearing right now is going to come in contact with the ocean
eventually.
The new invisible threat that they're discovering is that microfiber from all our clothes
ends up in the ocean, and now they're finding already that it's being ingested by animals.
Does it pass through or does it end up in their flesh, and then we end up eating it?
These are the questions Dimitri Deheyn and his team at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
are exploring, as they work with The Swim expedition to investigate the strange little strings
known as microfibers.
Unfortunately, the fish will probably have microfibers in its gut.
So do I, and so do you.
It is estimated that every single person would have about three to five million microfibers
going through their body on a given day.
Shed by synthetic materials like polyester, spandex, and nylon, microfibers are so abundant
that the filters once designed to catch them clogged so dramatically that companies removed
them from washing machines altogether.
Today, these particles flush freely into waterways with every spin cycle.
Microfibers are about five microns in size or smaller,
about 20 times smaller than the diameter of your hair.
Microfibers are so small that they are able to adsorb contaminants;
and those contaminants may be many times more concentrated than in the surrounding water.
Microfibers are tinier and carry more charge than microplastics, meaning they may be circulated
more quickly throughout global water and air currents, and soak up more toxins or microorganisms
along the way.
They are so small that they are like little needles that can poke a cell.
These microfibers have been found in places as remote as the North Pole.
There are now increasing reports of microfibers from Europe, from the United States of course
from South America
and of course from Asia.
They are found in bottled water.
They are found in water fountains and anything that links to water,
beer, wine, any kind of liquid might contain some
microfiber, to some extent.
Those microfibers can go inside the cells of the digestive tract, and from there,
can they pass on into other tissues?
Can it affect asthma?
Irritation from the respiratory passages?
Or anything else?
With the help of the Seeker crew, Dimitri and his team are collecting samples of ocean
water and fish flesh to see if they can unravel the mystery of microfibers’ impact.
In terms of knowing what we breathe, what we eat, and what we drink,
it is important that we have a heat map of where microfibers are mainly concentrated.
We expect that every single big city would kind of have an area around it that would
be rich in microfibers, associated with where sewage
is discharged, but we don't really know what's truly offshore, far away from that.
We don't just try and catch fish to eat.
We also are collecting samples from their flesh, which we send back to be dissolved
and to see if there's microfiber in there.
To count the fibers in the samples from the boat, the team uses a blacklight,
because microfibers are fluorescent.
Many things in the ocean could fluoresce.
We have some sort of a program that can teach the computer to recognize
what microfibers are based on their shape, based on their length, and based on the combination
of spectral characteristics.
The technology analyzes the images using face recognition software.
So once microfibers can be mapped, Dimitri's team tests how these synthetic particulates
could actually impact our health, by using light production from species as a potential clue.
Organisms in the ocean that produce light, when they don’t feel good, they produce less light.
That's a brittle star, tiny, tiny one.
Evolutionary speaking, these animals are very close to you and I.
Its light production is directly correlated to the health of the nervous system.
So if the light does not follow a certain pattern, we can assess neurotoxicity.
It's good to use them as a proxy to what we could have as an impact for our own nervous system.
My vision for the future is positive.
We will start to learn from nature.
And that's the concept of biomimicry: what can we learn from nature to be the best integrated in nature?
Companies are already focusing on biomimicry aspects of microfibers in clothing
so that whatever we will generate will be fully reintegrated into the environment.
We live in nature.
We are part of nature.
We are part of a closed system.
We have water flowing through us and food flowing through us, and whatever pollution
we put out there, that will be flowing through us as well.
Eventually.
Be sure to visit seeker.com/theswim to read daily updates from Ben Lecomte,
track his progress in real time, and watch more videos about the science happening onboard Seeker.
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Thanks for watching.