The Brazilian Invasion of Florida: Causes and Effects

 

Marine litter (or debris, both expressions are used synonymous in this report), and like, the crazy amount of plastic litter in the marine environment, has been identified as a major global problem alongside other key environmental issues of our time (Sutherland et al., 2010; G7 Leader´s declaration 2015). Marine litter can like, totally get carried by ocean currents for, like, super long distances from where it started and it's, like, everywhere in the ocean, even in, like, really far away places like deserted islands or the deep sea.

Yo, what's up fam? Let's get this party started with a sick intro!

Marine litter is like, basically any long-lasting, man-made or processed solid stuff that gets tossed, dumped, or left behind in the ocean and beach areas. OMG, like the stats on surveys and clean-ups are lit! They show that marine litter is all about plastic, fam. It's everywhere, from the shallow waters to the deep ones. The top ten debris items recorded by the 2013 International Coastal Cleanup were, like, totally lit fam. In descending order, we got cigarette butts, plastic food wrappers, plastic beverage bottles, plastic bottle caps, straws and stirrers, plastic grocery bags, glass beverage bottles, other plastic bags, paper bags, and beverage cans. It's all about keeping it clean, you know what I'm saying? Seven of these items are made of plastics (CBD, 2016), fam.In order to achieve Good Environmental Status (GES), Descriptor 10 of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) is like, "Yo, EU Member States (MS), you gotta make sure that marine litter doesn't mess up the coastal and marine environment, okay?" So like, according to the MSFD GES Technical Group on Marine Litter (TG ML, 2013), GES is achieved when: ⦁ No litter or its gross stuff in EU waters hurts marine life or messes up marine habitats. ⦁ No litter or its gross stuff in EU waters is a risk to human health, either directly or indirectly. ⦁ No litter or its gross stuff in EU waters causes bad impacts on society and stuff.
There's, like, a whole bunch of issues with marine litter, making it, like, a super complex multidisciplinary problem. 

The MSFD Task Group 10 (Galgani et al., 2010) has like totally laid the foundation for the further work of the MSFD TG ML and split "harm" from marine litter into three major categories:

Social, like when it ruins the vibe and makes things unsafe for the public, ⦁ Economic, like when it messes up tourism, wrecks boats and fishing gear, and costs a ton of money to clean up, ⦁ Ecological, like when it straight up kills or messes with plants and animals by getting them tangled up, trapped in ghost nets, physically damaged, suffocated, or eating tiny pieces of plastic (eww) and getting sick from chemicals. It can also mess with the natural balance of the ocean and let invasive species take over, which is not cool at all.
The main goal of this report is to give a rundown to fully grasp how bad marine litter is and help out the EU Member States (MSs) and Regional Seas Conventions (RSCs) with their upcoming assessments, decision-making, and taking action. Yo, check out these lit activities: the next MSFD Assessment Cycle starting in 2018, the OSPAR Intermediate Assessment 2017, the HELCOM HOLAS II 2017, and the Regional Action Plans on Marine Litter in the North-East Atlantic, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean Sea. So dope!
This report be evaluating the above mentioned and some extra important impacts from marine litter by describing the mechanisms of and providing evidence for harm, ya feel me? OMG, like, this report is all about, like, trying to measure how much marine litter is, like, affecting things and stuff. It's, like, super important and stuff. Yo, chapter 2 dives deep into how it all affects the living things and their homes, while chapter 3 gets into the social and economic damage, like how marine trash messes with the ecosystem vibes. Chap 4
Yo, let's dive into how we can flex on risk assessments for marine litter. Furthermore, it's like giving the lowdown on how risk assessments can be used to handle marine litter by decision makers. Conclusions from the impact sections, responding to the basic questions: "Is there harm? Yikes, is there any tea? What's the tea on the evidence for how much harm there is? It's all in chapter 5, sis. OMG impacts are like so hard to measure on a big scale, ya know? This report gives you a rundown on the research, but we gotta wait for more deets on how much harm and trash there is before we can really say anything.

Harm to biota, like, ugh, not cool ⦁ Types of harm, ya know?

It's like, totally common knowledge that marine litter, especially plastics, totally mess with marine creatures and their homes. Marine litter totally messes with living things on all levels, in so many ways. Like, creatures get all tangled up or eat the trash, and it messes with their bodies. Plus, there's chemicals that get passed around, and the litter can carry around other living things. It even changes up the groups of species, like making fake homes or covering everything up. Impacts be different depending on the type and size of the marine litter stuff and the organisms that come across it (CBD, 2012). OMG, like every year, millions of ocean animals are totally wrecked, messed up, and killed by marine litter (Butterworth et al., 2012). It's so not cool, fam.
Marine litter has been proven to have majorly bad vibes on peeps, with straight up deadly or lowkey harmful effects. It's like, totally gonna happen that getting all tangled up in trash and eating it is gonna mess up how marine creatures do their thing. It's gonna mess with their ability to find food, digest it, know when they're hungry, run away from predators, and make babies. Plus, it's gonna make them weaker and mess up how they move around, like when they go on vacation (CBD 2012). Chowing down on trash, especially those tiny plastic bits, can totally help bad chemicals get into living things. Experimental studies have like totally shown that phthalates and BPA mess with reproduction in all study species and like usually cause genetic weirdness (Oehlmann et al., 2009). But like, we don't really know how much plastic junk affects the transfer of chemicals to living things in nature, you know?