A New Dive Site? It's Garbage!

In the '80s, the Lembeh Strait in Indonesia was considered nothing more than a place for the residents of nearby Bitung to dump garbage. But guide Larry Smith started muck diving at Kungkungan Bay, and the rest is history.

The 80,000-ton floating reef of plastic and trash, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is an environmental disaster. Twice the size of Texas and floating between California and Hawii, it is also teeming with life.

Researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have discovered 484 marine invertebrates from 46 species clinging to the detritus. They also fished out toothbrushes, rope, and bottle shards studded with gooseneck barnacles and jet-black sea anemones glistening like buttons. Anemones protect themselves with grains of sand, but in the garbage patch, they were covered in seed-like microplastics. Many other hitchhikers were coastal species that had discovered a way to thrive in the wide-open Pacific.

There's an English saying, "Where there's muck, there's money." How long before a liveaboard offers trips for avid macro-life photographers? Maybe they can combine muck diving with open ocean blackwater photography.