RESEARCHERS predict plastic ingestion will affect 99 per cent of the world’s seabird species by 2050, based on current trends.
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Researchers from Australia’s CSIRO and Imperial College, London, assessed how widespread the threat of plastic was for the world’s seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species had plastic in their gut.
The study found nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species had plastic in their gut.
In 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than five per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010.
Scientists estimate 90 per cent of all seabirds alive today have eaten plastic of some kind.
This includes bags, bottle caps, and plastic fibres from synthetic clothes, which have washed out into the ocean from urban rivers, sewers and waste deposits.
Birds mistake the brightly coloured items for food, or swallow them by accident, and this causes gut impaction, weight loss and sometimes even death.
The CSIRO’s oceans and atmosphere senior research scientist Dr Chris Wilcox said the results were striking.
“We predict, using historical observations, that 90 per cent of individual seabirds have eaten plastic,”
“This is a huge amount and really points to the ubiquity of plastic pollution.”
Dr Denise Hardesty, of CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, said seabirds were excellent indicators of ecosystem health.
“Finding such widespread estimates of plastic in seabirds is borne out by some of the fieldwork we’ve carried out, where I’ve found nearly 200 pieces of plastic in a single seabird,” Dr Hardesty said.
The researchers found plastics would have the greatest impact on wildlife where they gathered in the Southern Ocean, in a band around the southern edges of Australia, South Africa and South America.
Dr van Sebille, from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, said the plastics had the most devastating impact in the areas where there was the greatest diversity of species.
“We are very concerned about species such as penguins and giant albatrosses, which live in these areas,” Dr van Sebille said.
“While the infamous garbage patches in the middle of the oceans have strikingly high densities of plastic, very few animals live here.”
Dr Hardesty said there was still the opportunity to change the effect plastic had on seabirds.
“Improving waste management can reduce the threat plastic is posing to marine wildlife,” she said.
“Even simple measures can make a difference, such as reducing packaging, banning single-use plastic items or charging an extra fee to use them, and introducing deposits for recyclable items like drink containers.
“Efforts to reduce plastics losses into the environment in Europe resulted in measureable changes in plastic in seabird stomachs with less than a decade, which suggests that improvements in basic waste management can reduce plastic in the environment in a really short time.”