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The North Pacific Ocean contains an area the size of the continental United States covered in plastic debris. The highly mobile Laysan Albatross Phoebastria immutabilis, which forages throughout the North Pacific, is quickly becoming the poster child for the effects of plastic ingestion on marine animals due to their tendency to ingest large amounts of plastic.

In a recent paper, Dr. Lindsay Young (ACAP's North Pacific News Correspondent) and her colleagues examined whether Laysan Albatrosses breeding on Kure Atoll and Oahu, Hawaii, 2150 km away, ingested different amounts of plastic by putting miniaturized tracking devices on birds to follow them at sea and by examining their regurgitated stomach contents. Birds from Kure Atoll ingested almost 10 times the amount of plastic compared to birds from Oahu. Data from the tracking devices revealed that the birds were distributed over separate areas of the North Pacific during the breeding season and that birds from Kure overlapped considerably with the area of the "western garbage patch" off Asia which resulted in their greatly increased plastic ingestion.

The results are considered surprising because researchers had suspected that there may be some differences in the amounts of plastic ingested between colonies, but not on the level of an order of magnitude. Particularly since the colony on Oahu is less than an hour outside of urban Honolulu, and is much closer to the garbage patch in the Eastern Pacific between Hawaii and California that has received so much attention.

Unfortunately, whereas the albatrosses examined in this study were able to purge themselves of the plastic by regurgitating it, an unknown number of albatrosses die each year in the North Pacific as a result of ingesting plastic debris. Plastic ingestion can lead to blockage of the digestive tract, reduced food consumption, satiation of hunger, and potential exposure to toxic compounds, to name but a few of its detrimental effects. This study highlights that garbage generated by human activities on land clearly impacts ocean ecosystems and the animals that rely on them, thousands of kilometres away.

Reference

Young, L.C., Vanderlip, C., Duffy, D.C., Afanasyev, V. & Shaffer, S.A. 2009.  Bringing home the trash: do colony-based differences in foraging distribution lead to increased plastic ingestion in Laysan Albatrosses? PLoS ONE 4(10): e7623. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007623.  http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0007623

News from Lindsay Young, North Pacific News Correspondent, 1 November 2009, updated 8 November 2009