The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually a unique ocean environment full of sea creatures that stick to the plastic trash.

• The “Great Pacific Ocean Patch” is a big mass of plastic in the water that moves around like a soup.
• A new study found that the patch was full of sea life that was living on the plastic trash.
• The results put into question the idea that coastal species couldn’t live in the open ocean.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more than just a swirling vortex of plastic moving in the open ocean more than 1,000 miles from land. It has become an ecosystem where many sea creatures cling to the trash.

In a study that came out Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, scientists who looked at the well-known trash heap found that it is home to dozens of marine species.

They found 46 different kinds of creatures living on the trash. Most of these were species that usually only live near shores, not in the middle of the ocean. Sponge, oyster, anemone, crab, barnacle, and worm were among the animals.

Most of the time, when people talk about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they mean an area in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii where trash floats together because of things like wind and currents. The area, which looks more like a big soup of trash than a single big pile, has become a sad example of plastic pollution in the seas of Earth.

The researchers took 105 pieces of floating trash from the patch and looked for signs of life in them. In the end, they found 484 creatures. More than 70% of the trash that was picked up had coastal animals in it.

Linsey Haram, who was then a graduate research fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre and a co-author of the study, told The Atlantic, “We expected to find some, but we didn’t expect to find so many different kinds of them.”

The results also went against the idea that coastal animals couldn’t live in the open ocean.

The writers said that the results show that the lack of available surface prevented coastal species from moving into the open ocean, not physiological or ecological limits as was thought before.

Matthias Egger, head of environmental and social affairs at The Ocean Cleanup and co-author of the study, told The Wall Street Journal that the marine species that eat trash are having a great time. “That’s a big change in how scientists think about things.”

The study also found that many animals from the coast were living on the same piece of trash as animals that live in the open ocean. This brought together species that would not have met before.

Biogeographer Ceridwen Fraser from the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study, told The Atlantic, “As humans, we are making new types of ecosystems that may have never been seen before.”