Last week came photographer Chris Jordan's shocking photos of dead Laysan Albatross chicks, their decaying bodies filled with plastic that their parents had scavenged from the water of the Pacific Ocean.
Today, thanks to Lindsay Young of the University of Hawaii and her colleagues, we are learning more about albatrosses and plastic.
In a new paper available from PLoS One, Young reports that Laysan Albatrosses at remote Kure Atoll, the most remote of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, ingested 10 times more plastic than birds nesting on Oahu, not far from urban Honolulu.
This map from Young's paper shows the locations of Kure Atoll and Oahu and the western and eastern garbage patches in which the birds forage. Arrows indicate the directions of currents.
Data from tracking devices placed on adult birds revealed that they were distributed over separate areas of the North Pacific during the breeding season and that birds from Kure overlapped considerably with the area of the "western garbage patch" off of Japan. The overlap resulted in their greatly increased plastic ingestion.
"We were very surprised with the results," says Young. "We suspected that there may be some differences in the amount of plastic that was ingested, but to discover that birds on Kure Atoll ingested ten times the amount of plastic compared to birds on Oahu was shocking. Particularly since the colony on Oahu is less than an hour outside of urban Honolulu, and is much closer to the garbage patch in the Eastern Pacific between Hawaii and California that has received so much attention."
Young indicates that the results were further supported when the plastic items were examined. Almost all of the pieces recovered from birds on Kure Atoll had Asian characters on them, while none of the plastic found in birds on Oahu had similar writing.
"We were sorting through these boluses [the non-digestible parts of the albatross’s diet] right after Christmas, and there were so many small plastic toys in the birds from Kure Atoll that we joked that we could have assembled a complete nativity scene with them," says Young.
The most common identifiable items were paraphernalia from the fishing industry -- line, light sticks, oyster spacers, lighters. The strangest item? A sealed jar of face lotion with fresh-smelling lotion still intact inside.
While the albatross examined in this study were able to purge themselves of the plastic by regurgitating it, thousands of albatross die each year as a result of ingesting plastic. The debris leads to blockage of the digestive tract, reduced food consumption, satiation of hunger, and potential exposure to toxic compounds, to name but a few of its detrimental effects.
Young's findings are worrying for another reason: The population on Kure has 3,900 pairs, while Oahu's albatrosses number only 75 pairs, raising the question: How long can the larger population sustain itself while it tries to eat more of our waste?
Finally, here's more evidence of the horrific impact of plastics on albatrosses: In this video, co-author Cynthia Vanderlip performs a necropsy on an albatross chick on Kure Atoll that died from ingesting more than 306 pieces of plastic. -- M.M.
Read about the December 2009 issue of Birder's World magazine.
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