The presence of microplastics in the Tyrrhenian Sea promotes the spread of bacteria, some of which are dangerous to humans and animals. That's what emerges from results of a 2019 research effort by a team from the National Research Council's Institute for Water Research in Verbania (CNR-IRSA) in collaboration with colleagues from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the U.S.-based Texas A&M University, conducted both in the open sea - in the waters of Tuscany and Corsica - and at coastal sites in Forte dei Marmi (Lucca) and Cinque Terre (La Spezia). The results, now published in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, reveal that plastic particles provide an ideal additional substrate for the growth of communities that already proliferate in the so-called marine snow present in the water, i.e., the natural assemblage of particles composed of algae, aquatic plants, zooplankton - such as remnants of fish and other animals - and phytoplankton.
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