The subjects of Mandy Barker's photographs look like creatures from another world, but they're actually quite mundane: discarded fishing nets, plastic bottles, and toothpaste tubes. They're what sits beneath the surface of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Barker photographed the "soup," the plastic debris suspended in water from the Garbage Patch, to create strange alien scenes. But even though the objects in these photos aren't alive, they're still dangerous, killing ocean life wherever the patch travels.

Soup [Mandy Barker via TreeHugger]