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 ...