Plastic in the ocean is a problem. It’s no mystery that fish, seabirds, and turtles all eat it, and often become ill or even die. Coral also eats it, but the mystery is why they do so. For a long time, scientists thought that coral ate anything they could reach, but new studies have found that coral might prefer plastic.
Vanuatu is a nation in the South Pacific, northeast of Australia. Vanuatu includes 13 larger islands and about 70 smaller ones, covering about 1300km. Most of the islands are mountainous, and covered in lush rain forests. Many are protected by coral reefs.
In 2015, Hannah Herbst was an eighth-grader in Boca Raton Florida. She got a letter from a nine-year-old pen pal in Ethiopia who had no access to lights, a steady flow of fresh water to drink, and other necessities.
What’s the biggest obstacle to cleaning up our oceans? It might be the sheer volume of the job. Scientists say that there are 269,000 tons of plastic debris floating on the surfaces of the
world’s oceans.
In 2016, 13-year-old Liam Henderson was worried about plastic in our oceans. He knew how much plastic is accumulating, and how difficult it is to remove. He got the idea that if plastic were magnetic, it would be easier to collect. He experimented by…
In the pantheon of invasive species, zebra mussels (and their cousin, the quagga mussel) have a place of honor–or maybe infamy is a better word. Since first being discovered in the Great Lakes area in 1988, the tiny bivalves have spread throughout the entire watershed
