On Australia's Remote, Beautiful Lord Howe Island, Seabird Chicks Ingest So Much Plastic They Crunch When Touched
On a remote Australian island renowned for its natural beauty, researchers have made a grisly discovery: Seabirds have ingested so much plastic they crunch when touched. The “harrowing” finding of plastic in the stomachs of birds — including chicks less than 3 months old — is a stark warning for the health of other species in the marine environment, said ecologist Alex Bond, principal curator at Britain’s Natural History Museum.
Bond returned this month from a visit to Lord Howe Island, a remote territory about 360 miles off Australia’s east coast. He is part of a team of researchers from Adrift Lab, a global unit that studies the effect of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, that has been studying the island’s birds, sable shearwaters, for almost two decades. The latest trip led to the discovery of a dead bird with 778 individual pieces of plastic packed into its stomach “like a brick,” Bond said. It beat last year’s grim record in which a bird was found to contain about 400 pieces. The researchers think the seabirds have been fishing pieces of plastic from the ocean and feeding them to their chicks.
“This isn’t microplastics,” Bond said in a phone interview Thursday. “We’re talking items up to and including the size of bottle caps and tetra pack lids, cutlery, clothes pegs, the takeaway soy sauce fish bottle that you get from restaurants. … That’s the sort of thing that we’re finding in the stomachs of these 80-day-old chicks.”
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The plastic is being fed to chicks by their parents, who mistake it for food while out fishing in the Tasman Sea because of the chemical signal it emits, he explained. “These birds eat fish and squid, and, you know, the pieces that we pull out, there’s no way that that would be sort of accidentally attached … to a prey item,” he said. The plastic makes a “gut-wrenching, crunching sound” that can be heard by pressing just below the bird’s sternum — similar to where a belly button would be on a human, Bond said. “In the most severely impacted birds you can hear that while they are still alive.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/05/16/birds-crunch-plastic-pollution-lord-howe/
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