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The Constellation of Creatures Inhabiting the Ocean

Surface
The myriad species floating atop the world’s seas, called neuston, are mysterious and
understudied, complicating efforts to clean up plastic pollution.

Amanda Heidt
Jan 2, 2023

T he open ocean and the far reaches of outer space have much in
common. Stretching in their enormity from horizon to
ABOVE:
© ISTOCK.COM, VAARA

horizon, these unknowable expanses are ruled by such extreme

forces that the existence of life is generally the exception rather than the rule. And yet, just as stars
lie scattered across the night sky, coalescing in nebulas or falling headlong into the inescapable maw
of black holes, entire ecosystems populate the sea surface, as numerous and mystifying as their
celestial counterparts.

On a foggy morning in 2007, Rebecca Helm was strolling along California’s Monterey Bay, “picking
up plastic like you do when you are in love with the ocean and want to protect it,” she recalls.
Among the wilting seaweed and broken shells, she saw what looked like a translucent bit of trash,
and she picked it up to discard. But it turned out not to be plastic at all. Instead, it was the brittle
skeleton of an animal that had washed ashore after a life spent at sea.

Helm, then a fledgling marine biologist about to begin her PhD research, recognized the organism as
a by-the-wind sailor (Velella vellela), a jellyfish-like creature with a rigid sail to ferry it about the
ocean surface. In that moment, she says, she suddenly understood why animals such as turtles that
eat these creatures end up ingesting so much plastic—the small invertebrate mimicked its appearance
and texture almost identically. And as she’d soon learn, such seagoing invertebrates often end up in
the same locales as plastic, subject to many of the same forces—including wind, waves, and
currents—that concentrate trash in specific areas of the ocean.

Read Interactive Article By-the-wind sailors belong to a group of enigmatic

animals and other organisms called neuston that live
permanently at the surface of the ocean. Their
inaccessibility far out at sea means that scientists have only
sporadically studied them over the last century, with only a
small handful of PubMed-listed papers mentioning neuston
prior to 2007, and just over 100 since. Currently, there are
about 20 known species of neuston, including palm-sized
crustaceans, cnidarians, snails, sea slugs, and even an
insect, as well as a large protist (the floating seaweed
Sargassum). Like the 11 million metric tons of plastic that
enter the ocean each year, neuston accumulate in the
oceans’ “garbage patches”—regions formed by large ocean
currents known as gyres (see illustration on page 12) where
efforts to clean up plastic pollution have focused. As Helm
and others uncover more about the understudied sea
surface communities that flourish in these
environments—and the ecosystem services they
provide—some are questioning whether those well-
intentioned projects actually risk doing more damage than

Like the 11 million metric tons of plastic that enter

the ocean each year, neuston accumulate in the
oceans’ “garbage patches.”

good.

“I don’t think anyone trying to pull plastic out of the ocean is also trying to kill neuston,” Helm tells
The Scientist. But she describes what she sees as a reticence by certain cleanup initiatives to confront
Neuston often come in shades of blue or purple, such as this blue button (Porpita porpita). Scientists hypothesize
that this coloration acts as both camouflage and as a way to reflect UV radiation.
© DENIS RIEK

the pitfalls of their technologies when it comes to environmental impact. “I’ve noticed this absence
in discussion about what would happen to [surface] ecosystems. And so I really want to insert the
animals that live out there back into the broader conversation.”

Meet the neuston

In the fall of 2018, Helm, then at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, was scrolling on
Twitter when she paused on a post by The Ocean Cleanup, she recalls. The company had been
founded five years earlier by a high school student aiming to address plastic pollution, and while its
approach has changed over the years—from a platform powered by renewables to its current
iteration, two vessels that trawl the surface with a U-shaped net—the vision has remained largely the
same: to recover 90 percent of the plastic in the ocean by 2040.

When she saw the tweet, Helm says, she immediately thought of neuston, which she could clearly
see in some of the images of buoyed nets shared by the group. She delved into the literature looking
for research on how the project might affect marine surface ecosystems. Other than a systematic
characterization of surface-living species in the Pacific by a team of Russian scientists in the 1950s
and 1960s, surprisingly little was known about neuston at all. Soon, she began studying the
organisms herself, publishing papers and penning academic essays and articles to highlight their
unacknowledged importance and call attention to the potential harm that The Ocean Cleanup could
cause them. Her public support of neuston attracted collaborators interested in studying the creatures
and their relationship to plastic.

We go out there on a regular basis, so we can

finally get the data . . . and help fill this knowledge
gap, together with other scientists, on ecosystems
that we barely know.
—Matthias Egger, The Ocean Cleanup

One such scientist was Drew McWhirter, the lead scientist on a 2019 initiative called the Vortex
Expedition that followed long-distance swimmer Ben Lecomte as he traversed the Pacific Ocean to
draw attention to pollution. For 80 days, McWhirter lived aboard a 67-foot vessel called Discoverer,
supporting Lecomte’s swim and carrying out daily net tows to sample microplastics and neuston
within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), while Helm, back on shore, used imaging software
to flag animals in the photographs.

The results, published as a preprint last year, show that while animals are ubiquitous throughout the
GPGP, neither plastic nor neuston are distributed homogeneously. There is no “garbage mountain” in
the middle of the ocean, says McWhirter, who has since left the sciences. Rather, “they’re dispersed,
and there are clusters of items,” with abundances of neuston and of plastic correlating positively with
one another.

Although relatively little is known about neuston even today, research so far has revealed that these
organisms are at once alien and familiar. As a habitat, the GPGP shares many things in common with
coral reefs, including nutrient-poor water and high UV exposure, leading to similar adaptations. Like
corals, some neuston have internal symbionts for extra nutrition, and almost all neuston are blue or
purple, as are many corals; one hypothesis suggests that this coloration reflects more light, while
another links it to camouflage, Helm says.
That camouflage plays into an open ocean food web in which neuston act as both predator and prey.
The blue sea dragon (Glaucus spp.), a pelagic species of sea slug, preys upon Portuguese man-of-war
(Physalia physalis), for example, which in turn ensnare small fish and crustaceans. Neuston are also
a primary food source for other marine organisms, including threatened species such as loggerhead
turtles (Caretta caretta) and Laysan albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis), and economically
important fish such as juvenile Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and salmon (family Salmonidae).

Scientists are also now looking at roles that neuston may play on larger scales. Helm and her
colleagues recently linked neuston to 28 ecosystem services, including their potential for mediating
surface chemistry between the ocean and the atmosphere. Neuston live on the ocean’s skin, Helm
says, and “I don’t think anyone would question the importance of the health of our skin in protecting
us and our body.” In 2021, an international team similarly connected neuston to global climate
regulation via their ability to absorb solar radiation, fix carbon, and mediate the “air-sea exchange of
matter and energy,” the authors write in the paper.

A World Adrift
Far beyond the shore, oceans are dominated by a handful of massive gyres, circular currents that
continuously suck debris into their centers. In addition to amassing pieces of floating wood and
seaweed, a single gyre can also contain as many as 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. And mixed amid
all that detritus are animals—a collection of crustaceans, cnidarians, sea slugs, snails, and other
organisms collectively referred to as neuston. Scientists are now studying the unique adaptations
these organisms have for life on the high seas and the roles they may play in open-ocean
ecosystems.
NEUSTON: MODIFIED FROM © WIKIPEDIA; VECTORS MODIFIED FROM © ISTOCK.COM, ARTIS777;
SPICYTRUFFEL
See full infographic: WEB | PDF

Ensnared in the cleanup debate

Helm tells The Scientist that shortly after she began sounding the alarm that The Ocean Cleanup was
overlooking the potential harms of their work to neuston, the organization reached out to her about
meeting to discuss her concerns. When Helm requested a public forum, however, the conversation
broke down, she says. “So much of what they do, and so much of the success of their project, is
because of their public-facing [communication]. And so it’s all important to me that discussions
about impact happen in a public forum.” While she does speak with scientists at the organization
over email, that public meeting has never taken place.

While Helm has been one of the most vocal opponents of The Ocean Cleanup, she isn’t the project’s
only critic. Across Twitter and in academic publications, other researchers have lambasted the
project on everything from its carbon footprint to its financial partners. A 2021 study by the
Norwegian consulting company SALT analyzed The Ocean Cleanup’s 001 system—an early
iteration of their plastic-collecting technology that does not include some of the changes the group
has since made to address damage to wildlife—and found that the nets could encounter as many as
40 billion zooplankton per hour, and that many of these animals would die. Several scientists have
also noted that dragging a net between two ships is essentially trawling, a type of fishing that has
long been condemned for its high bycatch. The Ocean Cleanup has clarified that they drag their nets
slowly enough for mobile species to escape, and that each net is designed with an escape hatch that
engineers can open. But previous deployments have netted turtles.

Getting really mad on the internet hasn’t stopped

them from moving forward with their design, but I
do think that it has put them under continuous
pressure to take the impact really seriously.
—Rebecca Helm, Georgetown University

One person responding to these criticisms is Matthias Egger, the lead ocean field scientist at The
Ocean Cleanup, whose role is to conduct research that helps the engineers at The Ocean Cleanup
design a better product. Often, this work relates to the plastic—its sources, how it moves through the
water and for how long, and the harm it could pose—but those same questions are intrinsically
linked to the neuston community, he says.

While neuston weren’t included in the company’s first environmental impact assessment in 2018, a
more recent iteration released in 2021 noted the potential of the nets to damage these species, and in
the last few years the scientific team has begun sampling them during deployments. In a paper
published in 2021, Egger and his colleagues reaffirmed that neuston and plastic are ubiquitous in the
GPGP, but patchy. Their work, however, suggests neuston abundance does not directly correlate
with plastic accumulation, in contrast to what Helm and her colleagues found. Egger says that,
because both plastic and neuston take a variety of shapes, some are mostly shifted about by wind,
while others move at the mercy of currents or waves. “For me,” says Egger, “there was no indication
that they accumulate all together with plastic.”

The group has used that information to refine their plastic-tracking models, which The Ocean
Cleanup crew uses to target its efforts to the most polluted areas and to identify plastic hotspots that
may also be populated by fewer animals, Egger says. In addition, he now samples neuston ahead of
and behind the net to determine what changes, if any, are happening at the community levels. “With
these new data, we aim to refine that understanding of which are really the key species we need to
look out for.” Moreover, project engineers have made changes to the nets, including a larger mesh
size, to minimize capture of marine life, and prior to hauling the nets onboard, the crew allows them
to sit for up to an hour to give animals time to escape. The risk of damaging marine life is one Egger
takes seriously, he says, and is “exactly why we currently have one [cleanup] system in there, and
not ten.”

Regardless, Helm has continued to voice her criticisms, in part because she believes that the science
should come ahead of the cleaning. “Getting really mad on the internet hasn’t stopped them from
moving forward with their design, but I do think that it has put them under continuous pressure to
take the impact really seriously,” she says.

She points to the way another group, the California-based Ocean Voyages Institute, has approached
the problem of ocean plastic more thoughtfully. The group divvies out geolocating tags to volunteers
passing through the GPGP to flag large pieces of debris such as ghost nets, disused fishing nets that
float aimlessly through the ocean. Tagging the trash not only allows vessels to avoid them, but also
turns them into beacons for tracking ocean currents. Once enough pieces have been marked, a
sailboat journeys out to retrieve the tags and the garbage they mark. In 2020, the Ocean Voyages
Institute completed the largest single cleanup in history, recovering 103 tons of trash. Helm says that
targeting individual pieces of tagged trash accomplishes far more with less environmental impact.

Not everyone agrees with Helm that The Ocean Cleanup’s approach is entirely inappropriate,
however. Many researchers who spoke to The Scientist point to the sheer size of the ocean, the speed
at which neuston repopulate, and the immediate threat of plastic pollution as reasons to push ahead.
“The thought of not cleaning up the ocean because of it affecting the neuston life is pretty
ridiculous,” McWhirter says, adding that the mesh of the nets from The Ocean Cleanup that he has
seen is “big enough for neuston life to pass through.” Lanna Cheng, a professor emeritus at the
University of California, San Diego, who spent her career studying neuston species of the insect
genus Halobetes, similarly notes that dense floating aggregations of anything at sea, plastic or
neuston, are rare. “Therefore . . . it’s not going to really affect the surface ocean community that
much, even if we try some cleanup.”

Rui Albuquerque, a PhD student at the University of Aveiro in Portugal whose dissertation focuses
 Far out at sea, at least 20 species of protists, animals, and other organisms live their entire lives at the surface.
Many of the most basic facts about these species remain unknown, but scientists are starting to study them
and their relationship to the plastic pollution accumulating in the ocean.
© DENIS RIEK

on neuston, says that his research so far suggests those species have enough functional
redundancy—meaning many species can perform a similar ecological role—that any compositional
changes would be compensated for by other members of the community. “I think the take-home
message is [that] neuston appear to be a lot more resilient than we would have thought,” he tells The
Scientist. “Even if you remove one of the groups, another one could always replace that niche, and
even if the environmental conditions change, it appears that the neuston can adapt.”

Conducting research while taking out the trash

Beyond The Ocean Cleanup’s own research, Egger is also offering to collect data for other scientists
on the lengthy, expensive trips to sea that the group makes each year. He recently partnered with the
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, for example, to interrogate whether invasive species
are traversing the Pacific, possibly hitchhiking on debris, and feeding on neuston to fuel their
voyage. The Ocean Cleanup crew has also collected samples for Cheng to probe how Halobetes
interacts with plastic. “We go out there on a regular basis, so we can finally get the data . . . and help
fill this knowledge gap, together with other scientists, on ecosystems that we barely know,” Egger
says.

With plastic recovery operations now underway in the world’s marine garbage patches, scientists must
contend with how little was known about the organisms living at the surface.
© BEN LECOMTE

Helm, meanwhile, recently relocated to Georgetown University and is gearing up for a new phase of
her career. Many of the questions her lab has started to answer remain largely unexplored, including
what neuston communities look like in oceans around the world, whether they have seasonal
patterns, and how significant their contributions are to global processes. What researchers need, she
says, is more data, and to that end, she and several colleagues recently established the Global Ocean
Surface Ecosystem Alliance to encourage the public to report sightings of neuston and plastic. With
this crowdsourced data, Helm says she hopes to continue unveiling the mysteries of the open ocean.
“There’s definitely a lot of work left to do, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

When she first encountered a desiccated by-the-wind sailor on a lonely beach, Helm says she could
never have guessed that she would one day become a leading voice for high seas biodiversity. But as
she noted years later, the living things persisting at the interface between sea and sky had changed
her life. “I never meant to study the sea surface,” she shared on Twitter in 2021. “[B]ut now I believe
this forgotten world is one of the MOST IMPORTANT places on Earth.”

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