https://www.wired.com/story/baby-fish-are-feasting-on-microplastics/

Teeming off Hawaii’s famous beaches is a complex web of life—sharks, turtles, seabirds—that relies enormously on tiny larval fish, the food for many species. In their first few weeks of existence the larvae are at the mercy of currents, still too puny to get around on their own, gathering by their millions in surface “slicks” where currents meet. And it’s here where they’re increasingly meeting a pernicious, omnipresent foe and mistaking it for food: microplastic.

Researchers today published an ominous report showing that these slicks pack 126 times the concentration of microplastic as nearby surface waters, and eight times the density of plastic as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Microplastic particles outnumber larval fish in the slicks by a factor of seven to one, and dissections of the larvae reveal that many have plastic in their bellies. The consequences, both for these species and the food web as a whole, are downright terrifying.