These Birds Are So Stuffed With Plastic, You Can Hear Them Crunch
Squeaky stuffed animals are endearing. But when the animal is a real baby bird and its stomach makes crunching noises from all the plastic it has ingested, the endearment quickly turns into a dystopian nightmare.
This, however, is not happening in a faraway dystopia. Scientists from the Adrift Lab ocean research group were horrified to discover 'crunchy birds' on Australia's UNESCO World Heritage-listed Lord Howe Island. What's more, on their first day of fieldwork on the island this year, the researchers found a dead baby bird that had ingested 778 pieces of plastic, breaking the lab's 15-year record for the greatest amount of plastic ingested by a single bird—and by a long shot.
'This year we decided we're no longer going to say to each other 'it can't possibly get worse' because each year it just does,' the researchers wrote in an Adrift Lab news release. 'Terms like 'unprecedented' and 'horrific' really don't do it justice. As scientists on the front lines of the environment/pollution/biodiversity crises, we can barely begin to describe what witnessing this for two decades has done to our mental and physical well being.'
The team visits the island every year to monitor the impact of plastic pollution on shearwaters—dark-colored, long-winged migratory seabirds, as reported by CNN. Though the cases and quantities of ingested plastic have been rising, this year's fieldwork 'left us all speechless,' Adrift Lab marine biologist Jennifer Lavers, who was on the island, told CNN. Lavers and her colleagues think parent birds are mistaking plastic for food, and feeding it to their chicks.
A total of 778 plastic pieces in the bird, which died when it was between 80 and 90 days old, suggests its parents fed it approximately 10 pieces of plastic litter per day. The previous record was around 400 pieces, according to the lab's statement.
'This bird, and so many others in recent years, now contain such enormous quantities of plastic that when our research team gently presses on their stomachs, we hear awful crunching noises as the plastics shift around inside,' the researchers wrote. 'We literally call them 'crunchy birds' because…what other name could we give them.' Alex Bond, an ecologist at Adrift Lab, tells the Washington Post that they can even hear it in some live birds.
And it's not just microplastics, which scientists have already found everywhere from chewing gum to human testicles and brains. Bond reported finding objects as large as bottle caps and takeaway soy sauce fish bottles, as well as cutlery, clothes pegs, and countless amounts of unidentified hunks of plastic.
The ingested plastic is, unsurprisingly, harming the birds. During dissections, the team found scarring on the birds' kidneys and hearts, as well as 'dementia-like' brain damage in baby shearwaters, according to CNN. 'They don't kill the animal instantly, but they do cause it to have a shorter life span (and) lots of pain and suffering,' Lavers told CNN. Furthermore, she and her colleagues have noted a consistent decrease in the birds' body mass and wingspan over the years.
This spring, Australian Senator Peter Whish-Wilson traveled to Lord Howe Island along with the researchers. 'I wish every politician and every decision maker in parliaments around the world, because this is a global problem, I wish they could all experience what I experienced just for 24 hours, to come down here and do it themselves, and then they'll get it,' he told ABC Australia. 'We are not winning the war on waste.'
Scientists often treat seabirds as marine ecosystem health indicators, looking to them to understand how our oceans are doing. These sentinels are sending us a stark warning.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
60-Year-Old Gave Himself Early 20th Century Psychosis After He Went To ChatGPT For Diet Advice
A 60-year-old man gave himself an uncommon psychiatric disorder after asking ChatGPT for diet advice in a case published Tuesday by the American College of Physicians Journals. The man, who remained anonymous in the case study, told doctors he had eliminated sodium chloride, commonly known as table salt, from his diet after reading about its negative health effects. He said he could only find sources telling him how to reduce salt, but not eliminate it completely. Inspired by his nutrition studies in college, the man decided to completely eliminate sodium chloride from his diet as a personal experiment, with consultation from Chat GPT, researchers wrote. He maintained multiple dietary restrictions and even distilled his own water at home. 'For 3 months, he had replaced sodium chloride with sodium bromide obtained from the internet after consultation with ChatGPT, in which he had read that chloride can be swapped with bromide, though likely for other purposes, such as cleaning,' the case study read. While excess sodium can raise blood pressure and increase the risk of health issues, it is still necessary to consume a healthy amount of it. The man, who had no psychiatric history, eventually ended up at the hospital, worried that his neighbor was poisoning him. He told doctors he was very thirsty, but paranoid about the water he was offered. 'In the first 24 hours of admission, he expressed increasing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations, which, after attempting to escape, resulted in an involuntary psychiatric hold for grave disability,' the study read. Doctors concluded that the man was suffering from bromism, or bromide toxicity, a condition that is rare today but was more common in the early 20th century. The research noted that bromide was found in several over-the-counter medicines back then and contributed to up to 8% of bromism-related psychiatric admissions at that time. The hospital treated the man for psychosis and discharged him weeks later. His case highlights the potential pitfalls of using AI to seek medical tips. Dr. Margaret Lozovatsky, a pediatrician, warned last year that AI often misses crucial context. 'Even if the source is appropriate, when some of these tools are trying to combine everything into a summary, it's often missing context clues, meaning it might forget a negative,' she told the American Medical Association. 'So, it might forget the word 'not' and give you the opposite advice.' Related... ChatGPT Was Asked To List Everyone Trump Has Called 'A Low-IQ Individual' — And It's Pretty Racist Elon Musk Soft Launches 'NSFW' AI Companion A Week After Chatbot Goes On Antisemitic Tirade These Tragic AI Fails Are Proof That You Can't Fully Rely On ChatGPT To Plan Your Trip
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Signs Of MS Can Appear 15 Years Before Diagnosis, Says Study—And Many Women Miss These Early Clues
It's easy to assume that you'd know when you're dealing with a disease as serious as multiple sclerosis. But it can take years for people with MS to get a proper diagnosis. Now, new research suggests that subtle symptoms of the disease may show up even 15 years before someone gets diagnosed with MS. In case you're not familiar with it, MS (multiple sclerosis) is a chronic condition where the body's immune system mistakenly attacks the protective covering of nerve fibers. People can experience a range of symptoms with MS, including vision problems, muscle weakness, tingling in the arms and legs, and muscle spasms, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Some people with MS will eventually develop partial or complete paralysis, per NINDS. The findings of the new JAMA Network Open study are shocking, and raise a lot of questions about how people can tell if their symptoms are due to something minor or a condition as serious as MS. Here's what neurologists want you to know. Meet the experts: Clifford Segil, DO, is a neurologist at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, CA; Amit Sachdev, MD, MS, is the medical director in the Department of Neurology at Michigan State University. What did the study find? For the study, researchers analyzed the health records of about 2,000 people in British Columbia. They discovered that people who were eventually diagnosed with MS started interacting with the healthcare system more frequently 15 years before they first had symptoms that were later identified as being due to MS. Every person's health journey was different, but the researchers were able to pick up general trends. People who were eventually diagnosed with MS started seeing general practitioners more frequently 15 years before they were diagnosed for symptoms like fatigue, pain, dizziness, and mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. In the 12 years before their diagnosis, the patients saw a psychiatrist more often. Eight to nine years before a diagnosis, they had more frequent visits to neurologists and eye doctors, which may have been linked to blurry vision or eye pain. Three to five years before they were diagnosed, they visited the ER and had radiology visits more often. A year before their diagnosis, the patients saw physicians more often across a range of specialties, including neurology, emergency medicine, and radiology. This suggests 'that MS may have started earlier than previously thought,' the researchers wrote in the conclusion. Why might MS be so hard to detect this early? MS can look slightly different for everyone, and there is a wide range of symptoms, points out Amit Sachdev, MD, MS, medical director in the Department of Neurology at Michigan State University. MS is an autoimmune disease, and it can cause inflammation throughout the body, he explains. 'With excess inflammation, the body may feel generally dysfunctional,' Sachdev says. Meaning, you can feel lousy overall or in a lot of areas, making it hard for doctors (and you) to pin down what could be behind this. People with MS can also struggle with fatigue, which can be a tough symptom to tie to any one condition, Sachdev says. Symptoms like pain, mood changes, and fatigue tend to be linked more to an MS diagnosis after it's made, because they can be due to a range of health conditions, says Clifford Segil, DO, a neurologist at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, CA. He says he tends to discover these symptoms when he looks back at patient's health history after an MS diagnosis. What should you do if you're having these symptoms? Doctors say it's a stretch to suggest that you should assume you have MS if you're only dealing with fatigue or mood changes. But Sachdev says you also shouldn't brush off symptoms that just don't quit. 'Health is deeply personal. To manage it, you need to begin with a provider that connects with you,' he says. 'Ideally, you would begin with a single observation or concern that is bothersome. Focusing on this issue with that provider is the place to start.' But Segil stresses the importance of seeing a specialist if you're dealing with several symptoms you really can't explain. 'Whenever you have a constellation of symptoms which are without a clear medical diagnosis, seeing a neurologist may be wise,' he says. They can help take a careful assessment of your health history, along with ordering testing, to see what could be going on. You Might Also Like Jennifer Garner Swears By This Retinol Eye Cream These New Kicks Will Help You Smash Your Cross-Training Goals
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
How Teen Mathematician Hannah Cairo Disproved a Major Conjecture in Harmonic Analysis
When she was just 17 years old, Hannah Cairo disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, breaking a four-decade-old mathematical assumption When Hannah Cairo was 17 years old, she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a long-standing guess in the field of harmonic analysis about how waves behave on curved surfaces. The conjecture was posed in the 1980s, and mathematicians had been trying to prove it ever since. If the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture turned out to be true, it would illuminate many other significant questions in the field. But after hitting wall after wall trying to prove it, Cairo managed to come up with a counterexample: a circumstance where the waves don't behave as predicted by the conjecture. Therefore, the conjecture can't be true. Cairo got hooked on the problem after being assigned a simpler version of the conjecture to prove as a homework assignment for a class she was taking at the University of California, Berkeley. 'It took me a while to convince [course instructor] Ruixiang Zhang that my proposal was actually correct,' she says. Now, under Zhang's advisement, she has a paper on the preprint server and was invited to present her results at the International Conference on Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations in El Escorial, Spain. Cairo says she loves talking about her research and giving presentations with colorful and descriptive slides (see examples below). When asked what she studies, Cairo says, in short, 'points, lines and waves.' Born and raised in the Bahamas, Cairo moved to California at the age of 16, where she began to take classes at U.C. Berkeley. Now, at 18 years old, she is on to a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland to continue her research in Fourier restriction theory. Cairo has faced many difficulties in her journey, but she has found comfort and belonging in the field of mathematics and in the work itself. Scientific American spoke to Cairo about the way harmonic analysis is like dropping stones into a still pond, her transgender identity and the reasons she loves mathematics. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] Beyond 'points, lines, and waves,' how would you explain your field of study, harmonic analysis? Imagine that you're at a pond, and it's a very still pond, and you drop a stone into it. You see these circular waves spreading out. If you drop two stones in the pond, then you might notice this pattern called an interference pattern: instead of looking like circles, they overlap. You get high points, low points. And you get these interesting shapes [where they intersect]. What if you were to use a whole bunch of ripples—then what would you get? In harmonic analysis, you can actually prove that if you drop your stones in the right place in the pond, you can get any shape that you want. My specialty is known as Fourier restriction theory, which is the subdiscipline of harmonic analysis that I work in, where we ask what kind of objects can we build if we're only allowed to use certain kinds of waves. What if we're only allowed to drop the stones in certain parts of the pond? You won't be able to get just any object. In fact, you're only going to be able to get a relatively small family of objects. What the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture says is that the shape of the objects that we get are concentrated along lines. What does it mean to be 'concentrated along lines'? One way to think of the shape of objects is to ask: What is curvature? There are a few different ways you can define it. One possible way is to take a thin, long rectangle and ask how much of your circle can lie in this thin rectangle. What you'll find is that not very much of it can because it bends away, right? On the other hand, if you take something flat like the edge of a square, then you can get a whole side of that square just on one thin tube. So that means that the square is not as 'curved' as a circle. For the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, we say, consider this object that we're building out of these waves. And we want to say that not very much is going to lie on shapes that do not contain very many lines or thin rectangles. So how did you manage to disprove this conjecture? I looked at these shapes, and one thing that I realized is that the specific kind of waves that are used are concentrated along thick rectangles. This is actually something that is well known. So you end up looking at these waves that are concentrated on rectangles: You take these waves, and they intersect each other, and they make these certain shapes, but here [instead of circle waves] we use rectangle waves. So then we have all of these rectangle waves meeting each other. What I realized is that the shape of where they meet is not quite at the right angle to agree with the direction that these rectangles are pointing in. And so this led me to a rather complicated construction using fractals to arrange these rectangles. The original fractal construction doesn't actually show up in your paper though. What was your final counterexample? What I found out is that if you arrange these waves by taking a high-dimensional hypercube and projecting it down into smaller-dimensional space and then taking only those waves that lie in your region, then this is how you can determine where to put them [to break the conjecture]. What first got you interested in math? I've always been interested in math. I think that, for me, mathematics is an art. In my childhood, I was somewhat lonely. Math was sort of there as a friend almost. I think that art cannot necessarily be a friend in every way that a friend can be, but I think art is like a friend. And so, for as long as I can remember, I've always loved mathematics. Tell me more about how math was a friend to you. I think a lot of people don't think of math as very friendly. There's an analogy that I like to make, which is to another form of art: painting. And I think that if one were to take a class on paint, you could memorize the dates and times at which various forms of paint were developed—and maybe even which paints were used by which painters. And then you can figure out what processes you can use to determine what type of paint it is. I imagine this is useful in art history, but this is not art.... I shouldn't say that. Maybe there is an art to learning about paint. I'm not going to claim that there isn't because I don't study paint. But I think that math is a little bit like that—in school, people learn about [the mathematical version of] paint; they're not learning about painting. Mathematics is comforting to me because it's a way of exploring—to explore ideas and to think about them and to build more ideas out of other ideas. What's comforting about that is that it's independent of the world in some ways. If I'm having a sad day, a happy day, if I move to Maryland (I did just move to Maryland), mathematics is still there, and it is still the same thing. It's also just something that can occupy my mind. You've mentioned to me that you're transgender. How has that affected your journey? I think that it's probably more relevant in my journey as a person than as a mathematician. Being trans has forced me to see things about the world that I maybe otherwise wouldn't have seen. It's made me see the world differently and made me see people differently and made me see myself differently. Fortunately, in the math community, I think that most mathematicians are fine with trans people. I think that it used to be more significant [in my day to day] than it is now. These days it doesn't really make much of a difference. Why have you decided to go on the record now as being trans? Trans visibility is important. People have ideas about who trans people are, and I think that it's best to broaden that. Maybe I'm also hoping that people who think that trans people are 'less' than cisgender people might find themselves questioning that. The other thing is that it's good for trans people to know that they're not alone. I think that part of what helps trans people realize that they're trans is to know that there are more options for who you can be as a trans person. That's important to me. Thank you so much for sharing that. Where is your favorite place to do math? If I'm trying to be productive in writing something down, then I like to be at my desk, and I like to listen to Bach. If I am just trying to think about ideas, then my favorite place to do that is somewhere where I don't have to pay attention to very much else. I could just be sitting down somewhere thinking about stuff, or I could be going for a walk outside. I also like to talk to other people about math, which is another kind of doing math. I really like to give presentations about mathematics. I have these handwritten slides with all these colors and drawings. Luckily, in harmonic analysis, I can give a presentation like this, and then everybody is so happy, and they tell me my slides are cute. What's next for your research? I'm working on a research project with my adviser on Mizohata-Takeuchi and adjacent stuff and about a sort of different thing: the local Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. The process of learning more about this kind of mathematics is pretty exciting—not just for me learning more about what's out there but for the math community as a whole to try to understand these kinds of things better. [That's] something that I'm excited about. Solve the daily Crossword
