CHARLES MOORE

Captain Charles Moore founded two environmental organizations simultaneously in 1994: The Algalita Marine Research Foundation and Long Beach Organic. Captain Moore's intention was to address the relationship between urban hardscapes and the deterioration of our coastal ocean.

Long Beach Organic has:

• Created a "green patchwork quilt" of community gardens on vacant lots across the city.
• Practiced and promoted organic land management and gardening practices that conserve water, bioremediate urban soils and reduce run-off and its polluting effects on the ocean.
• Educated young people about the food security and independence that result from retaining rainwater and reusing greenwaste on site in an organic garden or edible landscape setting at their schools in Long Beach.

Algalita Marine Research Foundation has:

• Worked on the International Level to expand the monitoring of the coastal ocean by creating and facilitating government and volunteer programs from Australia to Mexico, including the archipelagoes of Fiji, Hawaii and American Samoa.
• Funded and provided the vessel for the first multidisciplinary baseline study comparing Ojo de Liebre and San Ignacio Lagoons; these most important calving areas of the gray whale have never been looked at comprehensively from an oceanographic standpoint.
• Done the first study ever comparing the biomass of the plankton living in the surface waters of the Central North Pacific and the plastic fragments which are rapidly displacing it.

This last achievement will be the topic of his presentation.

ABSTRACT

"Marine debris poses a threat to marine organisms through ingestion." Here we assess the potential for ingestion of plastic particles in the open ocean by measuring the relative abundance and mass of neustonic plastic vs. zooplankton near the central high-pressure area of the North Pacific Gyre. We did this by sampling 11 random sites, collecting neuston samples from the upper 3m using a manta trawl lined with 333u mesh. The abundance and mass of neustonic plastic we observed was the largest ever recorded in this area at 334,271 pieces/km² and 5,114 g/km². Plankton abundance (1,837,342 organisms/km²) was about five times higher than that of plastic, but the mass of plastic was about six times that of plankton (841 g/km² ). The most common types of plastic were plastic fragments and thin plastic films, cumulatively accounting for 87% of the total plastic pieces.