Impact of Plastic Pollution on Marine Life in the Mediterranean Sea

Marine litter is an environmental problem of global concern with well-documented impacts on marine biodiversity and ecosystems. At a global scale, marine litter is mainly composed of plastic. Plastics can affect marine organisms mainly through ingestion and entanglement but also through the facilitation of transport of organisms via rafting or the provision of new habitats for colonization. Impacts vary according to the type and size of the plastics and can occur at different levels of biological organization in a wide variety of habitats. In this chapter, we reviewed and synthesized literature in order to describe the impact of litter on marine life in the Mediterranean sensitive ecosystem. The review focused on the following impact categories: ingestion, entanglement and other effects (e.g. colonization and rafting). In the Mediterranean, reports of ingestion were made for more than 49,454 individuals from 116 species, of which the taxonomic group with the greatest number of species impacted was Teleosts (~59%). Forty-four species were found entangled in marine litter (59% were invertebrates, mainly Cnidarians), of which the species with the highest number of entanglement records in the Mediterranean Sea was the loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta). One hundred and seventy-eight taxa were found rafting on floating objects or using marine litter as a substratum, including Chromista and Bacteria. The most common phyla rafting on marine litter were Arthropods and Cnidarians.