Which trench-dwelling amphipod was named for the plastic found inside it?

Eurythenes plasticus is a small scavenging crustacean from the Mariana Trench, described formally in 2020. It was named for what was inside it. When the team examined the gut of the specimen designated the type - the reference animal against which every future example of the species is compared - they found a fragment of PET, the plastic that drinks bottles are made of.

The naming was deliberate and slightly confrontational. Species names are usually honorifics or descriptions; Alan Jamieson and Johanna Weston chose one that permanently records the condition in which the animal was first met. Whatever else happens, the formal scientific name of this species now contains the reason it became famous.

It is not an isolated find. Survey work across the deepest trenches on Earth has recovered synthetic fibres and fragments from amphipods at every site examined, including animals from around 10,900 metres down in the Mariana Trench - the deepest water there is. The proportion of animals containing plastic tends to be higher in the deepest samples rather than lower.

The reason that ordering makes sense is grim. A trench is the bottom of a funnel: material that sinks has nowhere further to go, and the animals living there are adapted to eat whatever arrives from above, indiscriminately, because very little does. The deep sea was the last place anyone had a reason to call untouched, and it turned out to be the collection point.