With her bare hands, UCI Professor Joleah Lamb on Monday fished out pieces of plastic waste she had collected that morning from Newport Beach: a sports drink bottle, a trash bag, child’s sand toy, crumpled foam cup and some straws.
“Oh, wait,” she said, letting go of a particularly grimy piece. “I am going to use these gloves,” and she slipped on the latex protectors before picking up the degraded water bottle again. “There are a million bacteria on it.”
Even during the Earth Day demonstration Monday at the University of California, Irvine, Lamb could not help but punctuate — even unknowingly — her groundbreaking findings, which have reverberated from Irvine to Indonesia to the United Nations.
First to connect plastic with coral death
That research has discovered ordinary plastic trash in the ocean carry bacteria which are infecting coral reefs with deadly diseases that strip the colorful organisms of their color, then slice them up like a horrific killing machine.
Riddled with pathogens, the plastics increase the disease risk of a coral from 4% to 89%, Lamb said.
Her team’s research estimated 11.1 billion pieces of plastic sit atop coral reefs just in the Asian Pacific Ocean, an astoundingly high number that will grow by 40% by 2025 if nothing is done, she predicted.
“I think no coral is safe from plastic,” said Lamb, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who has studied 33,000 square feet of coral reef off the coasts of Australia, Myanmar and Indonesia.
Lamb’s research landed her on the front page of Science Magazine last year. She also co-authored a paper presented to the United Nations Environmental Assembly. Her research was the first in the world to correlate dying coral with plastics.
A life lived among reefs
The easy-going, affable professor loves teaching undergraduate students and getting them excited about saving ocean life. She has spent more than a decade living next to the great coral reefs of Australia, earning her doctoral degree from James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.
“Coral reefs are something that I am passionate about,” she said. “Yet I see them being taken down by plastics, and that is just devastating.”
She has called for a worldwide effort to reduce plastic waste and eliminate a heretofore unknown silent killer. She wants the United States to lead the charge. Lamb said countries that manage plastic waste see fewer effects.
She singles out Indonesia as one of the bigger polluters, followed by cruise ships and fishing boats, which routinely dump plastic and raw sewage into the Pacific Ocean, adding to a floating disease threat she calls “microbial rafting.”
Pathogens attach themselves to the cracks of a foam cup, the creases of a plastic bag or a plastic fiber enhanced jacket and replicate. At the table in the quad between the Biological Sciences building, students peered through microscopes at single-cell bacteria which form colonies on pieces of plastic from Balboa Peninsula.
Plastics give bacteria a ride
“Bacteria find a niche, a home, and they form communities. I think of it as a Trojan horse that then cuts into the coral’s tissue, which gets eaten away like gangrene on a human limb,” Lamb explained.
She has identified one bacteria that kills coral, vibrio coralliilyticus, which also kills shellfish. It is from the same genus as the bacteria that causes cholera in humans. This bacteria attaches itself to the coral, a living animal, and kills it.
Can bacteria from plastic ocean trash infect other marine life? Lamb hopes to learn more about the movement of pathogens and where they come from.
“We don’t know if it is transferable (to humans),” she said.
Why save coral?
Coral reefs are not just beautiful color displays as seen underwater in Indonesia, Australia, Hawaii and the Caribbean. They also buffer the land from erosion and protect against the tidal waves from tsunamis, she said. Many villages in Southeast Asia rely on catching fish in coral reefs for their livelihood.
Lamb’s team includes post-doc student Raechel Littman, who said on a recent expedition she saw Lamb pick up trash from a coral reef and reveal decaying coral, lost forever. The coral also get “bleached” and are stripped of their ability to absorb nutrients.
“Then the coral dies of starvation,” Littman said.
Lamb’s work was mentioned in a speech by Britain’s Prince Charles last year. But she said it will take more than European countries to solve this problem. “We need to work with other countries in Asia to help stop this. We need to have policies in place,” Lamb said.
