Nearly Every Seabird May Be Eating Plastic By 2050

sciencehabit writes: According to a new study almost every ocean-foraging species of birds may be eating plastic by 2050. In the five large ocean areas known as "garbage patches," each square kilometer of surface water holds almost 600,000 pieces of debris. Sciencemag reports: "By 2050, about 99.8% of the species studied will have eaten plastic, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Consuming plastic can cause myriad problems, Wilcox says. For example, some types of plastics absorb and concentrate environmental pollutants, he notes. After ingestion, those chemicals can be released into the birds’ digestive tracts, along with chemicals in the plastics that keep them soft and pliable. But plastic bits aren’t always pliable enough to get through a gull’s gut. Most birds have trouble passing large bits of plastic, and they build up in the stomach, sometimes taking up so much room that the birds can’t consume enough food to stay healthy."

Comments

Seabirds and landfills

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The birds that figure out NOT to eat plastic (or how to get their body to deal with plastic after it's consumed) will survive to breed ...

Indeed.

There are clouds of seagulls constantly hanging out at the landfills in the San Francisco Bay Area, picking food out of the trash as it's dumped. Lots of plastic in the same load (even now that the plastic grocery bags are banned.) Why haven't THEY gone extinct yet?

Do the "environmentalists" think these gulls are better at distinguishing, or surviving ingestion of, plastic than the ones at sea? Or do we have to put roofs over our landfills to protect these endangered avian pests?

Somehow I'm not convinced this is a real problem.