The Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not seem like it would be a hospitable place. It is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest streak of land. The sun is brutal and unrelenting there, the waters nutrient poor. There is nothing much to see except the eponymous garbage.

But look more closely at this plastic garbage, as scientists did recently, and you’ll find plenty of life: sea anemones as small as a pinky nail or as large as the palm of your hand; white, lacelike bryozoa; hydroids sprouting like orange feathers; shrimplike amphipods; Japanese oysters; mussels. None of these creatures belong here. They are all coastal animals, adapted to the turbulent, nutrient-rich shores where water meets land, but they have all somehow learned to survive in the open sea, clinging to plastic.

According to a new study, these animals are now living side by side in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with creatures that normally inhabit the middle of the ocean. Coastal and open-sea ecosystems are blurring together into a single, plastic-bound one. “As humans, we are creating new types of ecosystems that have potentially never been seen before,” says Ceridwen Fraser, a biogeographer at the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study. The Garbage Patch, far from being some barren wasteland, is the site of an active experiment in biology.

Coastal podded hydroid and open-ocean gooseneck barnacles live on floating plastic. (Photo courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup, in coordination with Smithsonian Institution)

The scientists behind this study were originally intrigued by debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami: Even after six years, debris was still washing up in the U.S. laden with creatures native to the Japanese coast. The scientists counted more than 60 species of mollusks alone. If coastal creatures could survive a six-year ocean crossing on plastic, how much longer could they survive? Could they be living on the high seas permanently? Ocean currents tend to trap floating objects in one of five gyres around the world, the most infamous of which is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between California and Hawaii. If coastal animals have found a new, plastic-based home anywhere in the open ocean, it would be here.

The “patch” is less a solid island of trash than a soupy swirl of debris ranging from microscopic pieces of plastic to larger objects such as fishing nets and buoys. Getting there is not easy, because it is so far from land. The scientists teamed up with the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that was testing technology for removing trash from the gyre, to collect and freeze 105 pieces of garbage. Linsey Haram, then a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, remembers traveling to a California port in late 2018 to pick up trash bags full of nets, bottles, buoys, flower pots, clothes hangers, and buckets. She and her colleagues found coastal species on 70.5 percent of the debris. “We expected to find some; we just didn’t expect to find them at such frequency and diversity,” Haram told me. These migrants were not a minor part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ecosystem.

On two-thirds of the objects—essentially tiny floating islands—animals native to coasts were living side by side with animals native to the open ocean. They were smashed together into a single ecosystem and even a single food chain; for example, Haram told me, the coastal sea anemones were eating sea snails. The team also found evidence of the animals reproducing: The anemones were budding off tiny baby anemones, and some of the female crustaceans carried little broods of eggs. This suggests that they have taken up permanent residence and aren’t just eking it out temporarily.  

Coastal aggregating anemones found on a black floating plastic fragment. (Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, Linsey Haram)

Scientists call the ocean surface where water meets sky the “neustonic” or “neustic” habitat. Long before the advent of plastics, this habitat was dominated by natural objects such as kelp, wood, and pumice, on which life could gain a floating toehold. But these were relatively ephemeral. The influx of man-made plastics into the ocean might be “dramatically expanding a long-existing but previously minor habitat,” David Barnes, a marine ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, told me in an email. It could also change the neustonic habitat in unpredictable ways: Some of the species that once drifted on organic matter, for example, might make the switch to living on plastics better than others. Scientists previously found that a marine insect named Halobates sericeus might actually be benefiting from the abundance of material in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It once had to lay its eggs on the rare floating feather or pumice stone; now it can just use plastic.

The waters around the plastic in the Garbage Patch are teeming with floating life too: Portuguese man o’ wars, blue sea dragons, tiny blue hydrozoans evocatively named by-the-wind sailors. Unlike coastal species that need to hitch a ride on something else, these floating animals likely bobbed here on their own via ocean currents. Little is known about many of them or how the proliferation of tiny plastic islands is affecting them. “We’re trying to learn really basic stuff,” says Rebecca Helm, an ecologist at Georgetown University who has cataloged these creatures in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Cleaning up the plastic around them is not straightforward: Attempts to collect floating debris, she has written, might entrap and threaten these species.

Many of the Garbage Patch objects that Haram and her collaborators found covered with coastal animals come from the fishing industry: nets, buoys, ropes, crates, eeltrap cones. These items last so long in the ocean, she pointed out, precisely because they are engineered to last a long time in seawater. They are part of an industry that has destroyed ocean ecosystems by removing billions of fish and shellfish from their home. Its plastic remnants are now also disrupting old ways of life in the ocean, creating new ways that we never intended and cannot yet imagine.

It’s happened again. What could have been—what should have been—an ordinary Monday morning in America was marked by another mass shooting. Yesterday, a gunman opened fire at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky. Five people were killed and eight others were injured, including a 26-year-old officer in critical condition who had just graduated from the police academy.

In his public remarks in response to the shooting, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear seemed to hold back tears as he talked about how a dear friend, Thomas Elliott, was among the dead.

“Tommy Elliott helped me build my law career, helped me become governor, gave me advice on being a good dad,” Beshear said. “He’s one of the people I talk to most in the world, and very rarely are we talking about my job. He was an incredible friend.”

Beshear’s comments highlight a truth that can get obscured in coverage of mass shootings: The victims are not just a number, and the web of pain is much bigger than we may think. I am part of that web. Two years ago, my dad was killed in a mass shooting at a grocery store in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado.

[Tim Alberta: Requiem for the Spartans]

Too often, when we talk about the cost of these tragedies, we talk about the people, like my dad, who were killed. It’s time we totaled that price more honestly. Let’s also count the collateral damage. Let’s count the family members, the friends, the people who ran for their lives or hid in a bank vault. Let’s count the police officers, first responders, and doctors who tend to bodies ripped apart by bullets. Let’s count the teachers, religious leaders, journalists, lawyers, jurors, and therapists who absorb these harrowing stories. Let’s count the brave souls who confront gunmen. Let’s add in the cost of subjecting schoolchildren to active-shooter drills and teaching office workers to “run, hide, fight.” Let’s think about the depression, anxiety, and PTSD that can make it hard to leave the house.

If we added up all of that, then maybe we could finally get serious about whether we’re willing to pay the price.

I’m still tallying up the toll on my own life. I can’t go shopping without an escape plan. I worry about how to protect my children in a world that didn’t protect my dad. When a news alert pops up on my phone, my thumb hovers over it for a few seconds—I’m terrified it will announce another mass shooting. That’s what happened yesterday morning, when I saw an alert that multiple casualties had been reported in Louisville. Like so many times before, I was frozen with fear. Panic coursed through my body as I thought about all of the people who were just learning their loved one was in a mass shooting; that pain feels unbearable. I held my toddler on the couch and cried as I watched the news.  

It’s impossible to move forward when mass shootings happen so frequently. Buried deep inside my heart is a trauma time machine that keeps transporting me back to March 22, 2021.

I was at work when my mom called. “There’s an active shooter at King Soopers,” she said.  

Heat bloomed inside my chest and crept along my collarbones. King Soopers is my family’s neighborhood supermarket. As a child, I’d run barefoot through the store after swim practice, begging my parents for rose-shaped meringue cookies from the bakery.

“Dad went grocery shopping,” my mom continued.

The neon colors of the California radio studio where I worked began to swirl around me. I rushed to the balcony, gripping the peeling turquoise guardrail with one hand and placing the other on my pregnant belly. My daughter kicked gently.

The afternoon quickly spiraled into chaos. We couldn’t reach my dad. Mom drove to the store, and my younger brother called the local hospitals. I watched the news from hundreds of miles away. King Soopers—my King Soopers—was on every channel I flipped through. Boulder’s Rocky Mountain foothills, dusted in snow, provided a majestic backdrop to the crime scene playing out below. Armed officers wearing helmets and bulletproof vests swarmed the parking lot. SWAT vehicles parked crookedly beside customers’ cars. Twisted yellow tape draped the perimeter.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Coming undone in the age of mass shootings]

After nearly 10 years as a reporter, I was on the other side of the story. Watching press conferences on my laptop, I observed journalists shouting out conventional questions that suddenly struck me as cold. When they asked about possible motives, a metallic taste flooded my mouth. All I wanted to know was whether my dad was safe.

We got the answer in the middle of the night. My dad, Kevin Mahoney, 61, was one of 10 people killed, a group that also included a Boulder police officer with seven children, three people in their 20s, a King Soopers employee I’d known since I was little, three moms, and a local business owner.

I would later learn my dad had been minutes away from heading home. He’d just put two reusable bags full of groceries into the trunk of his Acura SUV and two cups of coffee into the center console. He looked forward to grocery shopping and getting coffee, especially during the coronavirus pandemic: It was a reason to get out of the house and say hi to the people he knew. Whenever he went to the store, he’d get two cups of coffee—“one for today and one for tomorrow,” he’d say.

But that tomorrow never came. A 21-year-old man wearing tactical gear pulled into the lot and began shooting. My dad tried to run, but he had no chance. For months, I agonized over a million what-ifs—what if he’d shopped just a little bit faster? What if he hadn’t stopped at the Starbucks kiosk inside the store? I couldn’t get out of my brain the image of his body lying facedown on the pavement.

When I think of my dad, I think of sunshine. He loved hiking, action movies, and, most of all, his family. Even though he worked a lot, he always made time for my mom, my brother, and me. On warm summer evenings, he’d chase my brother and me through the yard in a childhood game we called “Monster.” I always thought he’d get to play the game with my children. Little did I know that one of the last times I would see my dad was at my wedding, when he walked me down the aisle with tears in his eyes.

I was 31 years old and six months pregnant with my first child when my dad was killed. My daughter gave me a reason to be strong, but losing a parent while becoming one placed me at an intersection that I hope few people have to experience. Through therapy, I’m learning how to integrate sorrow with joy. I’m grateful and elated to be pregnant with our second child—a little boy, expected this summer. But once again, I must accept that my dad will never hold my child in his arms.

[Read: ‘‘This is the price we pay to live in this kind of society’]

Over the past two years, I’ve watched my mom struggle with the fact that a violent stranger took away her husband and tore apart her cherished family. I’ve watched my brother suffer the loss of his dad—his best friend, the person he trusted with both everyday problems and big life questions. I’ve seen how helpless my husband feels when he’s trying to comfort me. I’ve also witnessed my friends’ anxiety about gun violence: The ones with babies are discussing homeschooling, because they’re afraid their children could go to school and not come back.

I don’t have all the answers, but I’m sure there are solutions. We have the power to break the pattern our country keeps repeating.

“It seems like we argue so much in this country, so much anger,” Beshear said yesterday. “But I still believe that love and compassion and humanity can lead us to a better place.”

As we read about and honor the victims of Monday’s mass shooting—Thomas Elliott, 63; James Tutt Jr., 64; Joshua Barrick, 40; Juliana Farmer, 45; Deana Eckert, 57—let’s also remember all the other people who are hurt. Let’s remember that the loss is so much bigger than what the headlines convey.

Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin criticises supporters of the European Super League, comparing them to the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.