Congratulations to Mike Gil and Joe Pfaller on a recent front page article in the Gainesville Sun regarding their research. The University of Florida researchers discovered that diverse communities of rafting animals can inhabit even the smoothest pieces of plastic debris if barnacles step in first to create complex habitat, similar to trees in a rainforest or corals in a reef. That means plastics could better transport foreign species across oceans than previously believed, said Mike Gil, as a doctoral candidate at UF, who led the study published Jan. 27 in Nature’s Scientific Reports and reported in UF NEWS.
