Saw this browsing RSS feeds – it’s from the Daily Mail so might be bollocks but I think they have just lifted it from a Royal Society journal.

This is plastic found in the stomach of one dead albatross.

The bird was found at Kure Atoll, a remote Hawaiian island made up of a blue lagoon and circular barrier reef. It is likely it starved to death.

A Laysan albatross has chicks on the Kure Atoll, which is under threat from plastic litter

Albatross adults fly thousands of miles in search of food for their young and often bring back plastic from the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ by mistake.

Discovered by Californian sailor Charles Moore in 1997, it is a far-flung marine soup made up of seven million tonnes of litter, brought together by ocean currents.

The garbage is incredibly difficult to clean up because it is not lumped together in one large mass.

Instead it is made up of billions of smaller trash islands, many of which are hidden underwater.

Environmental campaigner Suzanne Frazer organises beach clear-ups on the Big Island of Hawaii.

She said: ‘Common items found inside hundreds of thousands of dead albatross chicks include bottle caps, lighters, children’s toys, combs and toothbrushes.

‘Ingesting plastic can cause lacerations, blockages, starvation and dehydration.’

John Klavitter is the resident biologist on the neighbouring Midway Atoll.

He said an average healthy chick can have one ounce of plastic in its stomach but just two ounces of plastic could kill it.

‘Two ounces might not seem a lot, but plastic is very light so if you look at the volume it’s really significant. Perhaps about a third of their stomach is plastic’, he said.

‘That’s 30 per cent less food that the chick can have in its stomach.’

Plastic production is growing around nine per cent per year and is likely to exceed 300 million tonnes by 2010.

About 80 per cent of debris in the oceans is swept out from land, ten per cent is made up of fishing nets and the remainder is lost from cargo ships, according to U.N estimates.

Dr David Barnes from the British Antarctic Survey wrote one of the papers in the journal. He said: ‘Amongst the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to our planet’s surface is the accumulation and fragmentation of plastics.

‘Since mass-production in the 1950s, plastic-debris has accumulated in even the remotest areas. Clean-ups are costing millions of pounds and operate on every continent.’

The special edition of the journal has taken two years to compile and contains contributions from more than 60 scientists worldwide together with papers from industry and policy makers.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1193130/Pictured-The-astonishing-collection-everyday-plastic-items-swallowed-single-albatross.html?ITO=1490

🙁

Don’t forget the long line fishing as well – not exactly an unbiased source tho

http://www.savethealbatross.net/the_problem.asp

Here’s the BBC’s take on it – horrible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7314240.stm

Slightly off-topic, but I was equally shocked/depressed/sick/outraged/minded-to-commit-a-similar-act-of-violence-to-the-three-in-question when I read this yesterday.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8101008.stm

I don’t usually rise to the Daily Mail ‘look at THIS!!!’ kind of story, but it really did boil my pish…. 🙁

(…wanders off shaking head…)

[devil’s albatross]Maybe it was a stupid albatross and it died prematurely through the natural selection brought on by it’s inability to discriminate between Captain Birdseye’s finest fishfingers, and the packaging?[/devil’s albatross]

Although I have a better idea, why dont we send all the whiny trawlermen from Europe out to Hawaii to harvest ocean rubbish and pay them for polythene by the ton?

Yeah maybe Stoner, although 7 million tonnes of human rubbish isn’t exactly a natural hazard for them is it.

this is bad but Pigeons wont eat anything that isn’t clearly food, how come the Albatross hasn’t developed in such a way

I was wondering where my toothbrush had gone.

Quite sad that the above image makes for a real cool piece of art… 😥

But I suppose that’s what makes is “art” in my eyes perhaps…