As most people do, you are considering only fish and such. Things we can see. Not the bulk of all ocean life, the tiny microscopic creatures that dominate the ecosystem.
It's only the top surface, right? The ocean can be miles deep!
But the density of life in the ocean decreases geometrically with depth. By mass, the top inches contain more life than the entire balance of it. Because, sunlight.
Except the net completely transparent to microscopic organisms like plankton? The section "The System at Sea" on this site [1] goes into detail about the multitude of systems they have to prevent the impact on ocean life. There's some 9 image slides give information about it. With all those considered, am I missing something?
no parties of this exchange are missing anything here except for not one having been privy to the original and actual design of the system—which specific factors identified (i.e. surface microbiome, etc.), as everyone's comments demonstrate, are clearly worth having been taken, and continue to be worth taking into consideration with previous and future improvements and/or redesigns of such. no need for any of this standoffishness.
The life has, like it or not, integrated with the trash. Adhered to it; put spores on it; coated it. Remove the trash - remove some fraction of the life.
Not trying to be standoffish. Just being aware that the law of unintended consequences will bite you in the ass every time.
It's a concern, but it's orders of magnitude better to clean up the garbage than not clean up the garbage. Like, the entire foodchain being decimated by choking on floating garbage kind of difference. I mean, if you want to optimize for a soup of green goo and floating cottage cheese containers, that isn't exactly "leave no trace".
The 'garbage patch' is a soup of plastic flakes. Not like river trash; nothing at all like river trash.
To the degree this enterprise can remove pepper-sided particles of plastic floating near the surface, it will impact microscopic organisms almost exclusively. To the degree it does not clean at that level, it is not an ocean-cleanup device.
River garbage is, I think (and I began by saying) a brilliant solution. Keep it clean, rather than clean-up-after. Almost all the garbage comes from humans on land after all.
Hopefully this has already been researched to quantify the amount of life using plastic as a habitat. Intuitively though it just seems like it's going to be such a tiny, tiny fraction that the concern is basically not worth thinking about compared to the problems of ocean garbage...
The garbage patch is a soup of pepper-sized plastic flakes. You go there, you don't even know it's a problem until you take water samples and sieve them with a fine mesh.
Just as it's so easy to think of the ocean as fish and whales, it's easy to think of garbage on a human scale - yogurt cups, straws, shopping bags. That assumption leads us astray from the actual nature of the problem.
Keep it out, with this device, sieving rivers. A brilliant solution. Not so applicable to the open ocean. That's all I said, am saying, and am finished repeating.
Oh, this project is widely criticized over its entire existence. Don't rely on some commenter on HN for sure. Do your own research. It won't take long.
It's only the top surface, right? The ocean can be miles deep!
But the density of life in the ocean decreases geometrically with depth. By mass, the top inches contain more life than the entire balance of it. Because, sunlight.