Marine-dumped waste tyres cause the ghost fishing of hermit crabs

Poorly managed waste tyres pose serious environmental and health risks, ranging from air pollution caused by fire, leaching of heavy metals and outbreaks of mosquitos, to destruction of vegetation and coral reefs. We report a previously unrecognized ecological risk to marine organisms from waste tyres. Over 1 year, we made monthly counts of hermit crabs (n = 1278) invading and/or being trapped within six tyres anchored to the seabed at 8 m depth in Mutsu Bay, Japan. A complementary aquarium experiment in which hermit crabs were released into a tyre confirmed that they could not escape. We report marine-dumped waste tyres to ghost fish in a manner analogous to discarded fishing gear. Because hermit crabs play important roles in coastal food webs as both prey and scavengers, declines in their numbers as a consequence of this ghost fishing might affect coastal ecosystems.

• Publication year

  2021

• Venue

  Royal Society Open Science

• Publication date

  2021-10-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rsos.210166PMID 34729205PMCID 8548809
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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