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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...)
So, because one problem exists, we should ignore even worse ones? (Climate change and the mechanism that is causing it does more than simply warm things up, it also causes things like ocean acidification)
That is some sound logic I tell ya h'what.
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.
It's not even funny how grotesque this is.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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]
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
By 2050, nearly all articles posted on "news" sites will be hyped-up predictions of the distant future.
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.
It's too bad China (who will easily be out-polluting us in years to come) doesn't give two shits about our energy policy
Did you know that last year, China investments in renewable energy was bigger than that of all European countries combined? They accounted for more than 60%of the world's investment in that sector. And it's even bigger in other "green" areas (forest and wildlife protection, etc).
Nobody in China is thrilled by pollution. But over the last decades they had to deal with insane urbanization rates, the constant threat of starvation and other problems that are completely foreign to us, so yes, fighting pollution did not come first, but that doesn't mean they don't care. They just have to juggle many impossible priorities.
lucm, indeed.
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.