Neuston: Living Among Plastic Debris in the Open Ocean With plastic recovery operations now underway in the world’s marine garbage patches, scientists must contend with how little was known about the ...

The Ocean Cleanup project, founded with the vision of clearing the world’s oceans of plastic, has designed a 600-meter-long barrier with a three-meter-deep net, ostensibly to collect plastic passively ...

Imagine you’re on a small boat in the middle of the open ocean, surrounded by what looks like a raft of plastic. Now flip the whole world upside down. You remain comfortably attached to your seat—the ...

In the northern Pacific Ocean, two sky-blue ships are sailing parallel to one another, several hundred meters apart. Pulled behind them is a giant U-shaped barrier, which almost looks like a fishing ...

Imagine sailing across the open ocean when, all of a sudden, you find yourself surrounded by a living island of sea creatures - a whole ecosystem with different kinds of seagoing life all bunched up ...

Sitting just below our ocean’s surface is a host of often overlooked organisms; ones who help connect our world’s wide variety of oceanic habitats. They are “neuston” (named from the Greek word υεω ...

I am deeply concerned that a project intending to collect plastic from the ocean’s surface, known as The Ocean Cleanup, will sweep up countless floating marine animals–collectively called the ...

The myriad species floating atop the world’s seas, called neuston, are mysterious and understudied, complicating efforts to clean up plastic pollution. The open ocean and the far reaches of outer ...

Little is known about the neuston, but marine biologists fear this community of organisms living on the ocean surface could be decimated as nets sweep up plastic pollution. In May 2017, shells started ...