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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."
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 canâ(TM)t consume enough food to stay healthy.
We can start harvesting bird carcasses for plastic, taking it out of the environment, and acting as a source of plastic. Win-win. /sarcasm (that shouldn't be needed here... but...)
Instead of being concerned about the REAL environmental issues.... such as plastics and pollution of our bodies of water, hazardous chemical releases by our own government's negligence, and corruption of potable water supplies.
At last, our long, bloody war on seagulls may finally reach its conclusion!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
considering the quantity, there has to be somebody dumping garbage on a massive scale somewhere. I checked the Wikipedia article and it doesn't mention anything about the source. Considering the high cost of land in asia a doubt if landfills are good option. there has to be large scale dumping going on somewhere of post-consumer garbage.
dont eat plastic
ok so you did
you stoopid bird
out of the gene pool!
now fishes gonna eat u
meanwhile at the dump
'ocean foraging' boids
have been gulpin' plastic
since 1950s
who weeps for them
hey stoopid man, clean up ocean
not fer boids do it fer yerself
quick before endangered specie
is found thriving in the gyres
becuz then plastic gyres will become
protected international habitat
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
With all the industrial food wrapped into plastic containers, human also eat plastic, since almost all plastic leak chemical into the food.
Polyethylene and polypropylene may be the exceptions, but they always come with other chemicals that improve color or plasticity.
An interesting but positive side-effect of pollution.
I thought every bird was already eating plastic. Silly me.
This is why you shouldn't shit where you eat. I was watching a documentary on netflix about this. It's really sad and one of the reasons why I don't use plastic bags or drink from plastic water bottles. It'll take a revolution to fix this.
It's not even funny how grotesque this is.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
At least its not Alka-Seltzer.
Instead of watching them eat the garbage, why don't you get off your duffs and clean it up?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
We can perform miracles when we apply science to the problem. All we need here is to reformulate plastics into a nutritious dietary enhancement. Plastics have long taken many forms, textures and other characteristics with the brilliant work of scientists and engineers. The only plastic on my 1950 Pontiac was a hood ornament that looked like amber. Today there's no place to put a magnet in your car- everything is plastic.
Furthermore, let's look on some past breakthroughs, like in the 70s when we created the Six Million Dollar Man and edible panties. Didn't Kennedy and dedicated American scientists put a man on the moon? We can do this people!
Apologizing for all caps in title; it seems to be required at slashdot.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Just came across this picture yesterday, better than the one in the article:
http://www.afternoongossip.com/its-time-to-be-worried/14/
A Diet To Die For
One bird feasts on food that would leave most other animals stone dead
Nov 29th 2014
The Economist
Among an average of 528 types of bacterium found on the heads of 50 turkey and black vultures were those that can cause botulism, gangrene, tetanus, septicaemia, blood clots and metastatic abscesses in other animals. And although these birds did not have it, another study found Bacillus anthracis in vulture faeces. It causes anthrax, except in vultures.
Vultures clearly have strong stomachs, in every sense. With an acidity at least ten times that of a human’s, a vulture’s gut destroys a large amount of any potentially pathogenic bacteria that is ingested. Indeed, when the researchers analysed the contents of each bird’s large intestine, they could not detect some 85% of the micro-organisms they had found on its facial skin.
But what remains is hardly benign. The microbial flora in a vulture’s large intestine is dominated by two types of anaerobic faecal bacteria, Clostridia and Fusobacteria, both of which can be deadly to other animals. Some Clostridia species have been responsible for periodic mass die-offs in birds such as ducks, geese and waders (although other species can be beneficial), while Fusobacteria nucleatum is associated with human colon cancer.
-- The Economist, November 29th, 2014
[Just because seagulls and vultures can do it, doesn't mean terns and albatrosses can]
It is far more likely that some sort of weird emergent evolution will go an and birds will start to be able to digest plastic.
I can see upsides to it, but birst may start to taste funny after that ;) .
Stanford researcher declares that the sixth mass extinction is here
Stanford Report
June 19, 2015
That is the bad news at the center of a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species, populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
"[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said.
-- Stanford Report, June 19, 2015
I, however, am convinced you're a total fucking idiot.
The birds that survive will evolve and adapt to become capable of eating the plastic and somehow create the enzymes necessary to neutralize the harmful elements.
Not entirely unlike how humans have somehow managed to survive despite great disease plagues that SHOULD have wiped out entire generations. Although it may be like in Africa where those who are immune to terrible diseases, like Ebola, are shunned, and therefore unable to pass on their genes, unless they viciously rape and impregnate innocent women.
Seabirds May Be Eating Steak by 2020
Seabirds May Be Living on the Moon by 2020
Seabird May Become the Dominant Species on the Planet by 2020
Reducing one's use of paper products will not reduce global deforestation
I suggest banning the sale of lumber products taken from natural forests, Or of farm or other products created on formerly forested land without paying a heft fee per hectare of land.
Let the economic ramifications work their way back through the system and remove any significant incentive for people to deforest land.
By 2050, nearly all articles posted on "news" sites will be hyped-up predictions of the distant future.
I think deforestation is mostly due to countries trying to increase the amount of arable land they possess, not related to old growth nightstands and dressers. Considering that this action is taken to try and feed starving people, you're going to be hard pressed to get them to stop it.
It's actually pretty funny.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What is that crap in McDonalds nuggets and burgers?? Silicon Putty, the crap you rework seals with.
By 2050, about 99.8% of the species studied will have eaten plastic
This sounds a lot like the "one in three women around the world will get raped in their lifetime" bullshit figure that has been repeated ad nauseam over the last 10 years by people who couldn't calc.exe their way out of a paper bag.
lucm, indeed.
"I suggest banning the sale of lumber products taken from natural forests, Or of farm or other products created on formerly forested land without paying a heft fee per hectare of land."
I would take this farther. Let's stop using anything "wild caught" and favor that which is farmed, be it trees or seafood. Most especially, we want to absolutely ban the use of "wild caught" on labels as though hunting and gathering were somehow more "environmental" or "organic" than farming. If you care about sustainability, it's actually the other way around.
You need an environmental 9/11, "Sandy Hook", Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbor, "Remember the Maine", "Remember the Alamo", etc. moment to move people's cheese. Until then, we have too many other crises to think about. I mean, didn't you hear about Miley Cyrus accidentally showing a nipple during the VMAs? Think of the children!...
Heck - If some educated official in a position of power tried to actually do something about it (good or bad), they'd be shot to pieces by lobbyists and special interests that would outright lie to keep the money flowing. (See the tobacco and leaded gasoline industries - and who's to say who's next? Cellphone companies and cancer?)
Require that the specific gravity of every form of plastic be greater than 1. End of problem.
then start putting some vitamins in plastic.
the least we could do.
There are bacteria and eukaryotes that have been found consuming plastic in the ocean. It's only a matter of time until a bird consumes an "infected plastic" with said organism on it and isn't just killed off. Eventually, if we keep pouring plastic into the environment, this evolution will happen, but it could take thousands / millions of years.
In most poor countries, deforestation is also occurring because the people there still use wood / charcoal to cook and heat with. Those areas of the world don't have an electric grid like the US / Europe and depend upon this wood for survival.
Actually, if we keep having 3 cat4 hurricanes churning the Pacific garbage patch, you could easily argue that it's going to be one and the same problem.
Pretty sure that cat5 hurricanes is the minimum ...assuming you want a good signal.
Thats a really well worded find. "Can" is soft-speak for 'we imagined really hard and after alot of debate, we might just mention this because our Sierra club membership requires us to buy into the scare".
So, ignore all the real problems. Plastic in the oceans - gotcha. The birds wont have grand children, so we should be alarmed. Stop making drinks with ice cubes today and you'll be saving the planet tomorrow.
What huberus. Why are these things posted when there is so much going on in the world that isnt to do with man made global cooling and eco-stasis.
At least some birds will find a way. Perhaps some breeds humans like won't make it but birds as a group won't be killed by it. No way to predict what form the selective pressure will push.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So because gulls are doing well living out of garbage, there's nothing to worry about.
You're out of your mind.
You are right, of course. What amazes me is the fact that there are people in this forum who have modded your comment 'Funny'. Personally, I can't see anything funny in knowing that we as a society, because of our almost complete lack of concern for what crap we are spilling in the environment, cause millions of birds to die a slow, agonizing death. I challenge anybody - especially the idiots who think it is funny - to eat a couple of broken plastic spoons every day and tell me they enjoy the process of dying from pierced intestines.
Apart from whether one should feel a normal level of empathy towards wildlife or not, it is actually a significant issue. It is scientifically well established that different parts of the environment are closely connected - we talk about food webs, for one thing. We know that taking out just one, significant part of the food web can have a dramatic effect on everything, sometimes in surprising ways; a common theme, though, is that when it happens, it introduces instability, and when it finally settles down again, it is a much lower levels than before and with much lower species diversity.
Yet, we keep playing with these things, refusing to open our eyes and ears, like there was no tomorrow; I just hope we don't turn out to be right in that respect.
...because their pronouncements are as carefully contrived as anything by Leni Reifenstahl. Granted, this is slashdot, so it could just be incompetent editing.
Notice the summary starts with a categorical: ..."
"According to a new study almost every ocean-foraging species of birds may be eating plastic by 2050,,,"
Salted with a nice big statistic:
"..In the five large ocean areas known as "garbage patches," each square kilometer of surface water holds almost 600,000 pieces of debris.
Adds in a bit of fluffy FUD:
"...For example, some types of plastics absorb and concentrate environmental pollutants, he notes. After ingestion, those chemicals can be released into the birdsâ(TM) digestive tracts, along with chemicals in the plastics that keep them soft and pliable..."
And ends with a tragedy:
"...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 canâ(TM)t consume enough food to stay healthy...."
Except....these bits of information have very little to do with each other.
Those terrifying "600,000" pieces? Most of them are 0.5mm or less. A significant portion aren't even visible. Those pieces of plastic are hardly choking seabirds to death.
Look, BPA and other estrogenic compounds ARE an issue: for humans and for sea life. No doubt we need to work on that to get them out of the products we use and dispose of every day.
We need to stop talking in propagandistic terms about the 'Garbage Patch'es - that implies there's this floating reef of garbage which is simply a well-motivated lie.
Do I think it sucks that these particulates are in our food stream? Of course I do. But it's hard to imagine anything 7 billion use as ubiquitously as plastic NOT ending up in the environment. Histrionics and lies don't help the issue at all.
-Styopa
Of Course there's an explanation.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I might help if we stopped using up a decent portion of already cleared arable land for fuel production...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
This is why I actually prefer non-organic foods. I want farmers to use pesticides, gmos, and fertilizer. It's more efficient and better for the planet and humanity on the whole.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Dear Coward: you are an idiot.
And stupid people keep on reproducing, thus proving Darwin wrong....
A Diet To Die For
One bird feasts on food that would leave most other animals stone dead
Underground Lightning reminds me of a co-worker of mine.
He maintained that there was no need for any regulation of any dangerous chemicals, whether it was asbestos, sewage, or radioactive waste.
He insisted "We'll adapt to all that stuff". He never did have a good answer to my mentioning that adapt means that maybe two people out of a million might survive, and not very well at that.
And lest he get too smug, there are these weird little microspheres of plastic that are getting into the oceans. It turns out some manufacturers of skin exfoliants have switched away from traditional exfoliants like ground apricot seeds to these microspheres. Not for any good reason - they certainly don't work better.
But the plastics involved make it to the ocean, and they last a long long time, to be eaten by fish and other little sea critters.
One adverse effect is that they are estrogen mimics, and can mess up males reproductive organs. And eventually it gets back to us.
I suspect our guy might have eaten a lot of that fish already, because he's being a bit of a cunt.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It is far more likely that some sort of weird emergent evolution will go an and birds will start to be able to digest plastic.
I can see upsides to it, but birst may start to taste funny after that ;) .
So you figure that if we put a thousand people in a room and allow them nothing to eat but rocks, you'll come back in 10 years, and they'll all have evolved to eat rocks? Most plastic has no particular nutrients, although there are exceptions like casein derived plastic, or Henry Ford's unsuccessful soybean plastic for automobile body panels.
It's always good to understand that 99+ percent of all species have gone extinct. And often because of changing environment.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There are bacteria and eukaryotes that have been found consuming plastic in the ocean. It's only a matter of time until a bird consumes an "infected plastic" with said organism on it and isn't just killed off. Eventually, if we keep pouring plastic into the environment, this evolution will happen, but it could take thousands / millions of years.
Bacteria != an evolved animal. More likely, if any flying critters end up able to digest petrochemical plastic, that will be after the present ones have died off, and the chemical pathways to extract energy from plastics are initiated. Of course, this new food supply will be very limited, because humans will not likely be producing petrochemical plastics for those millions of years - if we are still around.
For all purposes, petrochemical plastics function much better as a poison than a food source.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A good sized piece of the deforestation pie is to increase oil nut and sugar cane production to feed the bio-fuel industry.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You do have to be careful with fertilizer, too much injures the soil's micro-flora which inhibits the crop's ability to absorb essential nutrients and minerals; modern farmers use a crop production service that analyses the soil, considers the crop being planted and applies a custom blended mixture of fertilizer and minerals. Production increases in Europe have been flat, it's hard to tell if this is because of their abhorance of GMO and pesticides, antiquated farming methods or increased bio-mass monoculture, but European soil is losing organic carbon compounds and fertility.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Let me ask you a sincere question, Beeftopia: does it even matter if Ehrlich's predictions have merit? Because they don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This sounds like great news, but I have to ask why we're focusing on feeding sea birds instead of people?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
600,000 pieces, or 6,000 or 6,000,000, it would depend on the size at which you stopped counting them surely? The problem is a variation on the Coastline Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... except they are counting bits of stuff that actually exist at many scales right down to the microscopic. I would have thought that the most meaningful measurement is kg of plastic per cubic meter of seawater in the range from the surface down to X meters. Because you know, Science!
There is no photograph real of this pacific garbage patch, because according to the people claiming it to exist it is made from microscopic plastic particles. The article uses a photograph that is commonly associated with this "garbage patch" which is cannot be proven to exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The patch is characterized by exceptionally high relative concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.[2] Despite its enormous size and density (4 particles per cubic meter), the patch is not visible from satellite photography, nor is it necessarily detectable to casual boaters or divers in the area, as it consists primarily of a small increase in suspended, often microscopic particles in the upper water column." Yet whenever there is a new story about this garbage patch they use photos like this: http://wastelessthinking.com/w... from article http://wastelessthinking.com/y... This photo is from a river not the pacific ocean. We are being lied to.
It's a cosmetic product. No good reason is possible. Just "Marketing said so".
'B'-ark material.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That's a pretty significant claim, for which I'd like to see a citation, because I think you're probably misunderstanding something of which I have heard.
In the mid-70s, bacteria cultured from a waste-water treatment plant at a nylon-manufacturing plant (in Japan, IIRC) were found to be able to metabolise the monomers that form nylon (two different 6-carbon chains with condensible radicals on the 1- and 6- atoms) from their relatively high concentrations in the waste water. They used the pre-nylon monomers for both energy production (the isotopically labelled carbon would be excreted as isotopically labelled CO2) and for incorporation into structural proteins, lipids etc. The mutation that allowed them to do this was a single nucleotide error which changed the reading frame on one sector of DNA, which allowed the monomers to be used as source material in their metabolic network, the rest of which continued to operate more-or-less unchanged.
That's the case I know to be true - I read up on it a decade or two ago, as the genetic work was a classic of the time. I have NOT heard of such bacteria being found in the general environment (because such monomers are pretty damned rare), and in any case cracking a condensed link in an established monomer is a very different job from grabbing a radical on one end of a short chain of aliphatic carbon.
I suspect that you've been reading articles a long way down the chain of "Chinese Whispers" from the original work.
Oh look, even wikipedia agrees with me!
Refs : Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1984 Apr; 81(8): 2421â"2425 "Birth of a unique enzyme from an alternative reading frame of the preexisted, internally repetitious coding sequence." S Ohno
Kinoshita S, Negoro S, Muramatsu M, Bisaria VS, Sawada S, Okada H. "6-Aminohexanoic acid cyclic dimer hydrolase. A new cyclic amide hydrolase produced by Achromobacter guttatus K174." Eur J Biochem. 1977 Nov 1;80(2):489â"495.
Kinoshita S, Terada T, Taniguchi T, Takene Y, Masuda S, Matsunaga N, Okada H. "Purification and characterization of 6-aminohexanoic-acid-oligomer hydrolase of Flavobacterium sp. K172." Eur J Biochem. 1981 Jun 1;116(3):547â"551. [PubMed]
I know that is is hackneyed to request Slashdotters to provide references to original sources, but that is the standard which is requested of real scientific and technical people, and I see no reason to lower to the "entertainment" industry's standards.
And of course, I remain open to the possibility that you've actually got some novel evidence. I haven't looked at this case in detail since before I got married.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Sorry, my mistake - it's one monomer, but the bugs in question can chow down on the raw monomer, but most of the material in the waste water is the dimer (two monomers joined head-to-tail, which obviously closes the loop and makes it impossible for the dimer to participate in the polymerisation reaction. There's a second enzyme in the system that can open up the dimer to form monomers, which the rest of the system can then digest. I don't know if this has been tested, but I'd suspect that the monomer-eating ability would have evolved first, because even if you supplied pure dimer, then it would have equilibrated to produce some monomer in solution, on which the bacterium could then feed. Adding the dimer-cracking ability - from some other hydrolysis enzyme - would make the system much more useful to the bacterium. Working the other way would, IMHO, be rather less likely. But I wouldn't stake more than a pint of beer on the question.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
here ya go "The study is the first to document the biological communities living on the tiny particles of debris known as microplastics, and recorded many new types of microbe and invertebrate for the first time." This is pretty "new" discovery, from 2015, so yeah you might not have heard about it yet.
Your purported support :
"Biological communities" living ON particles is one thing, similar to people living ON the coast ; people CONSUMING the coast is a different thing to people CONSUMING a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
And for reference, the Discovery channel is not a peer reviewed journal for publication of scientific reports. I'll grant that there is probably more science in the average hour of Discovery Channel than the average hour of ... well things like the Italian film that my wife is occupying the TV with at the moment ... but it's still pretty thin soup.
Following up from your link, the article seems to be a re-presentation of "Marine Plastic Pollution in Waters around Australia: Characteristics, Concentrations, and Pathways" Julia Reisser and 6 others, Published: November 27, 2013 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080466 Abstract Plastics represent the vast majority of human-made debris present in the oceans. However, their characteristics, accumulation zones, and transport pathways remain poorly assessed. We characterised and estimated the concentration of marine plastics in waters around Australia using surface net tows, and inferred their potential pathways using particle-tracking models and real drifter trajectories. The 839 marine plastics recorded were predominantly small fragments (âoemicroplasticsâ, median length = 2.8 mm, mean length = 4.9 mm) resulting from the breakdown of larger objects made of polyethylene and polypropylene (e.g. packaging and fishing items). Mean sea surface plastic concentration was 4256.4 pieces kmâ'2, and after incorporating the effect of vertical wind mixing, this value increased to 8966.3 pieces kmâ'2. These plastics appear to be associated with a wide range of ocean currents that connect the sampled sites to their international and domestic sources, including populated areas of Australia's east coast. This study shows that plastic contamination levels in surface waters of Australia are similar to those in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Maine, but considerably lower than those found in the subtropical gyres and Mediterranean Sea. Microplastics such as the ones described here have the potential to affect organisms ranging from megafauna to small fish and zooplankton.
Nothing there about organisms digesting plastics, though the original reportage from Discovery (sorry, it's not original - it's re-hashed from Agence France Presse, I think) does talk about the effects of organisms ingesting plastic particles, and I also pick up implications form Discovery's writers that the plastics then get caught up in the faeces of the organism, and the faecal pellets then sink to the sea bed, hopefully taking the plastic out of the system. Which might work, but if the pooh is re-eaten on the seabed, all bets are off.
Well, I don't see anything in that which goes beyond vague hints of mechanical erosion of plastic debris in the guts of marine organisms. Which is very definitely NOT digestion of the plastic in any chemical sense. (There is a mechanical sense used in the ore-processing industry where "digestion" includes mechanical reduction, but there is normally chemical digestion going on there as well.) I don't think you've made your case.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"