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Subtropical Convergence Zone, this time equipped with a trawl net and a volunteer crew. They began collecting water samples from the eastern edge of the Subtropical Gyre, trawling along a 564-mile loop encompassing exactly one million square miles of ocean. The larger items that Moore and his crew retrieved included polypropylene fishing nets, “a drum of hazardous chemicals,” a volleyball “half-covered in barnacles,” a cathode-ray television tube, and a gallon bleach bottle “that was so brittle it crumbled in our hands.” Most of the debris that Moore found had already disintegrated. Every time he lowered his net he caught in its fine mesh “a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments.”
    Moore didn’t discover this “plastic-plankton soup,” as he called it; since before Jules Verne invented Captain Nemo, oceanographers have known that convergence zones collect debris, and since the 1960s they’ve been worried about the persistence of “pelagic plastic,” which they’ve found in all the oceans of the world, including the Arctic. What Moore did discover were greater quantities of pelagic plastic than anyone suspected were out there. In 2001, he published a paper about his research in a scientific journal called the Marine Pollution Bulletin . The undramatic title, “A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre,” belied its dramatic findings. The total dry weight of plastic Moore’s samples contained—424 grams—was six times greater than the total dry weight of plankton and half again as much as any similar study had previously found. Moore and his coauthors proposed two hypotheses to explain these results: either the concentrations of plastic in this part of the ocean are aberrantly high, or else “the amount of plastic material in the ocean is increasing over time.” Subsequent research has shown that both hypotheses are likely correct: the amount of plastic material in the ocean is increasing, in convergence zones especially.
    Out on his front lawn, as I was leaving, I asked the heavyset Dr. E. what he thought of Ten Little Rubber Ducks. Despite the ominous future he’d augured in that handful of plastic dust, he thought Carle’s cheerful picture book was “delightful,” and he hoped that it would “make the ocean fun to kids.” He did have one criticism. He couldn’t figure out why Carle along with just about everyone else seemed compelled to turn the four Floatees into rubber ducks. Coverage of the story in newspapers and magazines almost always showed a picture of a solitary rubber duck, and usually not even the right kind of duck. What was wrong with the three other animals? “Maybe it’s a kind of bigotry,” Ebbesmeyer speculated. “Speciesism.”
    Ebbesmeyer loaned me a set of the toys that had survived his experiments, to be returned when I was done with them. I have been carrying them around with me ever since, and they are at present perched before me on my desk as I write. Monochromatic and polygonal in a Bauhaus sort of way, they bear little resemblance to the rubber ducks in Carle’s book or, for that matter, to any other toy animal I’ve seen. Though blow-molded out of a rigid plastic (low-density polyethylene, I would eventually learn), they look whittled from wax by some tribal artisan.
    The frog’s four-fingered hands (the left smaller than the right) seem folded in prayer. The limbs of the turtle are triangular stubs, its shell a domed puzzle of hexagons and pentagons. The duck’s head, too large for the flat-bottomed puck of a body it sits on, is imperfectly spherical, the flat plane of its beak continuing like a crew-cut mohawk over the top of the skull. Poke an axle through the duck’s puffed cheeks and its head would make a good wheel. Wildly out of scale and dyed a lurid,