Plastic Trash Litters Oceans, Decimates Bird Populations - KRT

[hatrack]

EDIT

Back in Seattle, where she's a computer analyst for Group Health, Anderson e-mailed photographs of the bird's carcass to experts at the University of Washington, Department of Fish and Wildlife, State Parks, Ocean Conservancy and Willapa National Wildlife Refuge. "Yes - Ellen - it is just as you suspected," wrote the Conservancy's Charles Barr, in a reply echoed by the others. "Seabirds are eating plastics that become lodged in their stomachs, causing death. I have seen dozens of photos such as this one - most of ... dead albatross on the Pacific Islands of Midway and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. ... Many of the albatross will even return to their nests to feed, by regurgitation, plastics to their chicks."

To fully understand the big deal over Anderson's dead bird, you need to know it was not a seagull. It was a Northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), identified by a tube atop its beak that spurts out excess salt. Like albatross and other pelagic seabirds, fulmars spend their whole lives way, way out in the ocean, coming to shore only during summer breeding, when females lay a single white egg on cliffs.

The rest of the time, the fulmars skim the waves, flying thousands of miles a year, feeding on small fish and jellyfish, crustaceans and larvae. "They're out on the open ocean where there's tremendous competition for scarce food, so they don't stop to look before grabbing whatever it is on the surface," says Alan Rammer, marine-education specialist with Fish and Wildlife. "Down the craw! Eat and go. As much and as fast as they can. Gorge and get back to the nest to feed the babies."

Fulmars have been around for millennia, and live as long as 40 years. Yet in the span of a generation, their diet has drastically changed. Now they feast on plastic. Their taste for plastic makes them like canaries in a coal mine, or rather, fulmars floating in flotsam. The dead seabirds tell us about the ocean's health. Dutch researchers have used the fulmars to monitor litter in the North Sea, analyzing the stomach contents of hundreds of birds over two decades. In the early 1980s, 92 percent of the fulmars had ingested plastic; on average, 12 pieces. By the late 1990s, 98 percent of bird stomachs contained plastic, an average 31 pieces.

EDIT

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/nation/14451115.htm

[AwakeAtLast]

1. This is just awful!

:(

We will never know how far our greed for oil (and its products) will go. Sad, very sad.

[kestrel91316]

2. This will make getting rid of the birds ever so much EASIER.

After all, they produce WAY too much fecal material (oohhh, how icky) and spread avian influenza. So we're better off without them, right?

RIGHT?

[Deja Q]

3. One never knows until it happens. Until then it's all conjecture.

Trouble is, humanity tends to put short term gain over prudence. Just ask ~6 billion people and they'll all say they'd take the easier way out.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Plastic is biodegradable

The problem is that it takes a lot longer to degrade than it takes an ecosystem to die.

And many plastics give off poisonous chemicals in the process of breaking down; especially plastics in the Teflon family.

Oh, we'll pay for our folly, all right.

--p!

[XemaSab]

5. My friend has a collection of plastic items

taken out of dead albatrosses, and you'd be really surprised at the number of mah jongg tiles represented in the collection. :(

[jpak]

6. The North Pacific is full of plastic debris

fishing gear, garbage, you name it.

In 2003, I participated in an oceanographic transect of the Pacific Basin from the Bering Sea (Arctic) to the Ross Sea (Antarctica).

The amount of garbage in the North Pacific between the Aleutian Islands and Hawaii was astonishing - one piece of visible plastic passing within 10 meters of the ship every 30 seconds or so (@ ~10 knots).

It was also the first time in 30 years of research that I observed dead marine mammals at sea. We encountered a dead bowhead whale north of the Bering Strait (we thought at first it was a capsized boat) and numerous (and very decomposed) young seal lion carcasses just south of the Aleutians.

Something is happening out there and it's not very nice...

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Bloody hell

That's a hell of a lot of junk in the middle of a very big ocean. :(

[One_Life_To_Give]

8. Ban not working?

I know dumping plastics at sea was banned.
Is the ban not working or is it from shore sources?

[jpak]

9. It's extremely difficult to enforce

Unless there is a "return address" on it (or unless they are caught red handed), there is no way to trace any particular piece of garbage back to the offender.

Most of the stuff I saw in the North Pacific was probably from fishing boats or cargo vessels.