How Millions of Microscopic Fibers Are Ending Up in Our Bodies | The Swim

You may not be wearing an insulated wetsuit like Pacific

swim

mer Ben Lecomte, but part of the suit you're wearing now will eventually come into contact with the ocean. The new invisible threat they are discovering is that the microfiber from all our clothes ends up in the ocean, and now they are discovering that it is being ingested by animals. Does it pass through or does it end up in your meat and then we end up eating it? These are the questions that Dimitri Deheyn and his team at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography are exploring as they work with The Swim expedition to investigate the strange little threads known as micro

fibers

.

Unfortunately, the fish will probably have micro

fibers

in its intestine. Me too and you too. It is estimated that each person would have between three and five million microfibers on their body on a given day. Microfibers, shed from synthetic materials such as polyester, spandex and nylon, are so abundant that filters once designed to catch them clogged so dramatically that companies removed them from washing machines entirely. Today, these particles flow freely into waterways with each centrifuge cycle. Microfibers are about five microns or less in size, about 20 times smaller than the diameter of your hair. Microfibers are so small that they can absorb contaminants; and those contaminants can be many times more concentrated than in the surrounding water.

Microfibers are smaller and more charged than microplastics, meaning they can circulate more quickly through global water and air currents, absorbing more toxins or microorganisms along the way. They are so small that they look like little needles that can puncture a cell. These microfibers have been found in places as remote as the North Pole. There are more and more reports of microfibers coming from Europe, the United States of course, South America and of course Asia. They are found in bottled water. They are found in water sources and anything that is related to water, beer, wine, any type of liquid can contain some microfiber, to some extent.

Can these microfibers enter the cells of the digestive tract and from there can they pass to other tissues? Can it affect asthma? Respiratory tract irritation? Or something else? With the help of the Seeker team, Dimitri and his team are collecting samples of ocean water and fish meat to see if they can unravel the mystery of microfibers' impact. In terms of knowing what we breathe, what we eat and what we drink, it is important that we have a heat map of where the microfibers are mainly concentrated. We expect every big city to have an area around it rich in microfibers, associated with where wastewater is discharged, but we don't really know what is actually out at sea, very far from that.

We don't just try to fish to eat. We are also collecting samples of their meat, which we send to them to dissolve and see if there is microfiber there. To count the fibers in the ship samples, the team uses a black light, because the microfibers fluoresce. Many things in the ocean could fluoresce. We have some kind of program that can teach the computer to recognize what microfibers are based on their shape, their length, and the combination of spectral characteristics. The technology analyzes the images using facial recognition software. So, once the microfibers can be mapped, Dimitri's team tests how these synthetic particles could actually affect our health, using the species' light production as a potential clue.

Organisms in the ocean that produce light, when they don't feel well, produce less light. That's a tiny, tiny, brittle star. Evolutionarily speaking, these animals are very close to you and me. Its light production is directly related to the health of the nervous system. So if the light doesn't follow a certain pattern, we can test for neurotoxicity. It is good to use them as an indicator of the impact we could have on our own nervous system. My vision of the future is positive. We will begin to learn from nature. And that is the concept of biomimicry: what can we learn from nature to better integrate into nature?

Companies are already focusing on the biomimetic aspects of microfibers in clothing so that everything we generate is fully returned to the environment. We live in nature. We are part of nature. We are part of a closed system. We have water flowing through us and food flowing through us, and any pollution we emit will also flow through us. Eventually. Be sure to visit seeker.com/the

swim

to read Ben Lecomte's daily updates, track his progress in real time, and watch more videos about the science happening aboard the Seeker. Click here to watch the next episode and don't forget to subscribe.

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