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 not possible to exit, whereas on different days the hooks they solid come again empty. These employees set out on daily basis to seek out the very best lobsters attainable for the prosperous vacationers who come to the area, whereas they and their households, reduce off from lots of the advantages of tourism improvement, get by on fish filled 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 current research. 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 completely different species utilizing the identical strategies because the cooperative’s companions. All have been dissected, and their digestive tracts eliminated and examined. Contaminants have been present in 57 p.c of the fish, with over a thousand microplastic particles recovered. The analysis famous that “fish caught with handlines in shallow waters close to the coast had considerably extra microplastics of their intestines than these 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 may be eaten however have little industrial worth. Two different strategies are used to catch extra invaluable species. A línea de rosario (“rosary line”) consists of a number of traces with a collection 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 house by fishermen to feed their households; the high-value fish are offered to vacationers right here within the state of Quintana Roo, which every year receives greater than 20 million guests who spend greater than $20 billion. Quintana Roo is the Mexican state with the best income from tourism, however that doesn’t trickle right down to the underside of the inhabitants pyramid. As of 2020, 42.6 p.c of the inhabitants in Puerto Morelos lived in poverty or excessive poverty, based on information from Mexico’s Secretariat of Economic system.
Rivera-Garibay highlights the risks of microplastics in fish. “These species are consumed by people. Microplastics include doubtlessly hazardous chemical substances, comparable to plastic monomers and components, and so they take in poisonous contaminants from the atmosphere, like dangerous microbes and algae which will trigger diseases in people,” Rivera-Garibay says. “Nonetheless, there’s nonetheless no stable proof that the protection of seafood is compromised by microplastics. A higher understanding of the impacts of microplastics on seafood is urgently wanted.”
