Latest news with #JenniferLavers
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The birds on this tiny, remote island are so full of plastic their bellies crunch
On a remote, crescent-shaped island surrounded by crystal-clear ocean live some of the most plastic-contaminated birds in the world. They have bellies so full of fragments, they crunch when touched. Lord Howe Island — a speck of land about 370 miles off mainland Australia, home to just a few hundred people — is the breeding ground for tens of thousands of sable shearwaters: dark brown-colored, long-winged ocean birds with strong hooked bills. Scientists from the ocean research group Adrift Lab have been visiting for nearly two decades to monitor these birds' exposure to plastic pollution. Every year they find more contamination, but this year was shocking, said Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist and coordinator of Adrift Lab, who recently returned from the island. Shearwaters were found with levels of plastic far exceeding anything the scientists had seen before. They discovered an extraordinary 778 pieces of plastic inside one chick alone, smashing the previous record of 403 pieces. It 'left us all speechless,' Lavers said. The scientists are now trying to solve the mystery of why this year was so bad. Plastic pollution is on the rise but 'does that explain a doubling in 12 months? Absolutely not,' she told CNN. 'So there's something else going on.' Seabirds are often referred to as sentinels for ocean health, and the story they're telling is alarming. Global populations have declined 70% over the last 50 years as they grapple with multiple threats, including from invasive species, the fishing industry and climate change. Plastic pollution is yet another danger and a particularly 'insidious' one as its impacts are so hard to detect, said Richard Phillips, a seabird ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey. Lord Howe Island offers a unique natural laboratory for studying seabirds. The shearwaters reliably come back to the same breeding colony each year , usually within inches of the same burrow, allowing scientists to track individual birds' progress. 'There's nowhere else in the world that I can think of where we could do a study like this,' Lavers said. The scientists visit every April and May, when the chicks are leaving their burrows for the first time and preparing to take their first big migration to the Sea of Japan. Shearwaters are nocturnal, so every dawn, the scientists go to the beach to find chicks that were too weak and emaciated to make the flight. They bring them back to the lab to examine them. 'We often see high levels of plastic in these birds,' said Alix de Jersey, a researcher at the University of Tasmania. The scientists return to the beach at night to analyze the healthier birds getting ready to fly. They 'lavage' them using a feeding tube, gently pumping water into their stomachs to make them vomit up the plastic. The process may not be pleasant, de Jersey said, but 'it's just fantastic knowing that that bird is starting its migration without this huge load of plastic within its stomach.' Most of the plastic found in the birds this year was made up of unidentifiable fragments but they also found bottle caps, tile dividers and large amounts of plastic cutlery, de Jersey told CNN. The plastic accumulates inside the birds' bodies and can form a kind of brick. The pollution is so crammed into some shearwaters, it's audible. 'You can hear the crunching of the bottle caps and the shards and things shifting and moving against each other,' Lavers said. The scientists believe most plastic is ingested due to parents accidentally feeding it to their chicks, instead of the fish and squid that make up their usual diet. Plastic may smell good to birds because of the algae that can coat it, said Matthew Savoca, a marine ecologist at the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation and Stanford University. 'Other times, birds may eat something that has already eaten plastic,' he told CNN. Shearwaters are particularly vulnerable because, while some birds will regularly throw up what they cannot digest, shearwaters 'only tend to regurgitate when feeding their chicks. The structure of their gut also means that plastic items are retained for a long time,' said Bethany Clark, senior seabird science officer at the conservation group BirdLife International. Scientists are still trying to unpick the health impacts; many are largely invisible. The Adrift Lab scientists take blood samples and dissect the dead birds. This year, as soon as they opened up the shearwaters, it was obvious there were 'systemic issues,' de Jersey said. She found scarring on the birds' kidneys and hearts. Plastic can block birds' intestines or cause starvation, but there are also 'sub-lethal' effects, Lavers said. 'They don't kill the animal instantly, but they do cause it to have a shorter life span (and) lots of pain and suffering.' Big pieces of plastic can dig into the birds' stomachs, causing excessive amounts of scar tissue. Microplastics might pass through the birds but leave a trail of toxic chemicals. The Adrift Lab team have even found eating plastic can cause 'dementia-like' brain damage in shearwater chicks. Over the last decade, the team has seen a very consistent decline in the birds' body mass, wing length and other measures. Lavers used to consistently find chicks too heavy for her 1 kilogram scales (2.2 pounds), but now the very heaviest top out at about 800 grams (1.8 pounds). What's happening to the birds on Lord Howe Island is 'truly troubling,' said Kimberly Warner, senior scientist at Oceana, an ocean conservation organization. Global plastic pollution is only getting worse, especially as cheap, single-use plastics — the vast majority made from planet-heating fossil fuels — continue to flood the market. An estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic waste enter the oceans each year, roughly equivalent to two garbage trucks-full dumped in every minute, according to Oceana. It takes centuries to break down. Horrifying images of dead albatrosses with clusters of colorful plastic spilling from their bodies, turtles eating plastic bags and whales entangled in plastic fishing nets are testament to how this pollution is affecting marine life. 'It's a crisis, and it's rapidly worsening,' said Lavers, who is still reeling from what they found on Lord Howe Island this year. 'I don't have words. I don't know how to explain what it is that I'm seeing.'
CNN
23-05-2025
- Science
- CNN
The birds on this tiny, remote island are so full of plastic their bellies crunch
Animal storiesFacebookTweetLink Follow On a remote, crescent-shaped island surrounded by crystal-clear ocean live some of the most plastic-contaminated birds in the world. They have bellies so full of fragments, they crunch when touched. Lord Howe Island — a speck of land about 370 miles off mainland Australia, home to just a few hundred people — is the breeding ground for tens of thousands of sable shearwaters: dark brown-colored, long-winged ocean birds with strong hooked bills. Scientists from the ocean research group Adrift Lab have been visiting for nearly two decades to monitor these birds' exposure to plastic pollution. Every year they find more contamination, but this year was shocking, said Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist and coordinator of Adrift Lab, who recently returned from the island. Shearwaters were found with levels of plastic far exceeding anything the scientists had seen before. They discovered an extraordinary 778 pieces of plastic inside one chick alone, smashing the previous record of 403 pieces. It 'left us all speechless,' Lavers said. The scientists are now trying to solve the mystery of why this year was so bad. Plastic pollution is on the rise but 'does that explain a doubling in 12 months? Absolutely not,' she told CNN. 'So there's something else going on.' Seabirds are often referred to as sentinels for ocean health, and the story they're telling is alarming. Global populations have declined 70% over the last 50 years as they grapple with multiple threats, including from invasive species, the fishing industry and climate change. Plastic pollution is yet another danger and a particularly 'insidious' one as its impacts are so hard to detect, said Richard Phillips, a seabird ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey. Lord Howe Island offers a unique natural laboratory for studying seabirds. The shearwaters reliably come back to the same breeding colony each year, usually within inches of the same burrow, allowing scientists to track individual birds' progress. 'There's nowhere else in the world that I can think of where we could do a study like this,' Lavers said. The scientists visit every April and May, when the chicks are leaving their burrows for the first time and preparing to take their first big migration to the Sea of Japan. Shearwaters are nocturnal, so every dawn, the scientists go to the beach to find chicks that were too weak and emaciated to make the flight. They bring them back to the lab to examine them. 'We often see high levels of plastic in these birds,' said Alix de Jersey, a researcher at the University of Tasmania. The scientists return to the beach at night to analyze the healthier birds getting ready to fly. They 'lavage' them using a feeding tube, gently pumping water into their stomachs to make them vomit up the plastic. The process may not be pleasant, de Jersey said, but 'it's just fantastic knowing that that bird is starting its migration without this huge load of plastic within its stomach.' Most of the plastic found in the birds this year was made up of unidentifiable fragments but they also found bottle caps, tile dividers and large amounts of plastic cutlery, de Jersey told CNN. The plastic accumulates inside the birds' bodies and can form a kind of brick. The pollution is so crammed into some shearwaters, it's audible. 'You can hear the crunching of the bottle caps and the shards and things shifting and moving against each other,' Lavers said. Listen to plastic crunching inside birds Sable shearwater birds on Australia's Lord Howe Island are so full of plastic their bellies make an audible crunching sound when scientists touch them. Source: Dr Jennifer Lavers/Adrift Lab The scientists believe most plastic is ingested due to parents accidentally feeding it to their chicks, instead of the fish and squid that make up their usual diet. Plastic may smell good to birds because of the algae that can coat it, said Matthew Savoca, a marine ecologist at the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation and Stanford University. 'Other times, birds may eat something that has already eaten plastic,' he told CNN. Shearwaters are particularly vulnerable because, while some birds will regularly throw up what they cannot digest, shearwaters 'only tend to regurgitate when feeding their chicks. The structure of their gut also means that plastic items are retained for a long time,' said Bethany Clark, senior seabird science officer at the conservation group BirdLife International. Scientists are still trying to unpick the health impacts; many are largely invisible. The Adrift Lab scientists take blood samples and dissect the dead birds. This year, as soon as they opened up the shearwaters, it was obvious there were 'systemic issues,' de Jersey said. She found scarring on the birds' kidneys and hearts. Plastic can block birds' intestines or cause starvation, but there are also 'sub-lethal' effects, Lavers said. 'They don't kill the animal instantly, but they do cause it to have a shorter life span (and) lots of pain and suffering.' Big pieces of plastic can dig into the birds' stomachs, causing excessive amounts of scar tissue. Microplastics might pass through the birds but leave a trail of toxic chemicals. The Adrift Lab team have even found eating plastic can cause 'dementia-like' brain damage in shearwater chicks. Over the last decade, the team has seen a very consistent decline in the birds' body mass, wing length and other measures. Lavers used to consistently find chicks too heavy for her 1 kilogram scales (2.2 pounds), but now the very heaviest top out at about 800 grams (1.8 pounds). What's happening to the birds on Lord Howe Island is 'truly troubling,' said Kimberly Warner, senior scientist at Oceana, an ocean conservation organization. Global plastic pollution is only getting worse, especially as cheap, single-use plastics — the vast majority made from planet-heating fossil fuels — continue to flood the market. An estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic waste enter the oceans each year, roughly equivalent to two garbage trucks-full dumped in every minute, according to Oceana. It takes centuries to break down. Horrifying images of dead albatrosses with clusters of colorful plastic spilling from their bodies, turtles eating plastic bags and whales entangled in plastic fishing nets are testament to how this pollution is affecting marine life. 'It's a crisis, and it's rapidly worsening,' said Lavers, who is still reeling from what they found on Lord Howe Island this year. 'I don't have words. I don't know how to explain what it is that I'm seeing.'
CNN
23-05-2025
- Science
- CNN
The birds on this tiny, remote island are so full of plastic their bellies crunch
Animal storiesFacebookTweetLink Follow On a remote, crescent-shaped island surrounded by crystal-clear ocean live some of the most plastic-contaminated birds in the world. They have bellies so full of fragments, they crunch when touched. Lord Howe Island — a speck of land about 370 miles off mainland Australia, home to just a few hundred people — is the breeding ground for tens of thousands of sable shearwaters: dark brown-colored, long-winged ocean birds with strong hooked bills. Scientists from the ocean research group Adrift Lab have been visiting for nearly two decades to monitor these birds' exposure to plastic pollution. Every year they find more contamination, but this year was shocking, said Jennifer Lavers, a marine biologist and coordinator of Adrift Lab, who recently returned from the island. Shearwaters were found with levels of plastic far exceeding anything the scientists had seen before. They discovered an extraordinary 778 pieces of plastic inside one chick alone, smashing the previous record of 403 pieces. It 'left us all speechless,' Lavers said. The scientists are now trying to solve the mystery of why this year was so bad. Plastic pollution is on the rise but 'does that explain a doubling in 12 months? Absolutely not,' she told CNN. 'So there's something else going on.' Seabirds are often referred to as sentinels for ocean health, and the story they're telling is alarming. Global populations have declined 70% over the last 50 years as they grapple with multiple threats, including from invasive species, the fishing industry and climate change. Plastic pollution is yet another danger and a particularly 'insidious' one as its impacts are so hard to detect, said Richard Phillips, a seabird ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey. Lord Howe Island offers a unique natural laboratory for studying seabirds. The shearwaters reliably come back to the same breeding colony each year, usually within inches of the same burrow, allowing scientists to track individual birds' progress. 'There's nowhere else in the world that I can think of where we could do a study like this,' Lavers said. The scientists visit every April and May, when the chicks are leaving their burrows for the first time and preparing to take their first big migration to the Sea of Japan. Shearwaters are nocturnal, so every dawn, the scientists go to the beach to find chicks that were too weak and emaciated to make the flight. They bring them back to the lab to examine them. 'We often see high levels of plastic in these birds,' said Alix de Jersey, a researcher at the University of Tasmania. The scientists return to the beach at night to analyze the healthier birds getting ready to fly. They 'lavage' them using a feeding tube, gently pumping water into their stomachs to make them vomit up the plastic. The process may not be pleasant, de Jersey said, but 'it's just fantastic knowing that that bird is starting its migration without this huge load of plastic within its stomach.' Most of the plastic found in the birds this year was made up of unidentifiable fragments but they also found bottle caps, tile dividers and large amounts of plastic cutlery, de Jersey told CNN. The plastic accumulates inside the birds' bodies and can form a kind of brick. The pollution is so crammed into some shearwaters, it's audible. 'You can hear the crunching of the bottle caps and the shards and things shifting and moving against each other,' Lavers said. Listen to plastic crunching inside birds Sable shearwater birds on Australia's Lord Howe Island are so full of plastic their bellies make an audible crunching sound when scientists touch them. Source: Dr Jennifer Lavers/Adrift Lab The scientists believe most plastic is ingested due to parents accidentally feeding it to their chicks, instead of the fish and squid that make up their usual diet. Plastic may smell good to birds because of the algae that can coat it, said Matthew Savoca, a marine ecologist at the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation and Stanford University. 'Other times, birds may eat something that has already eaten plastic,' he told CNN. Shearwaters are particularly vulnerable because, while some birds will regularly throw up what they cannot digest, shearwaters 'only tend to regurgitate when feeding their chicks. The structure of their gut also means that plastic items are retained for a long time,' said Bethany Clark, senior seabird science officer at the conservation group BirdLife International. Scientists are still trying to unpick the health impacts; many are largely invisible. The Adrift Lab scientists take blood samples and dissect the dead birds. This year, as soon as they opened up the shearwaters, it was obvious there were 'systemic issues,' de Jersey said. She found scarring on the birds' kidneys and hearts. Plastic can block birds' intestines or cause starvation, but there are also 'sub-lethal' effects, Lavers said. 'They don't kill the animal instantly, but they do cause it to have a shorter life span (and) lots of pain and suffering.' Big pieces of plastic can dig into the birds' stomachs, causing excessive amounts of scar tissue. Microplastics might pass through the birds but leave a trail of toxic chemicals. The Adrift Lab team have even found eating plastic can cause 'dementia-like' brain damage in shearwater chicks. Over the last decade, the team has seen a very consistent decline in the birds' body mass, wing length and other measures. Lavers used to consistently find chicks too heavy for her 1 kilogram scales (2.2 pounds), but now the very heaviest top out at about 800 grams (1.8 pounds). What's happening to the birds on Lord Howe Island is 'truly troubling,' said Kimberly Warner, senior scientist at Oceana, an ocean conservation organization. Global plastic pollution is only getting worse, especially as cheap, single-use plastics — the vast majority made from planet-heating fossil fuels — continue to flood the market. An estimated 33 billion pounds of plastic waste enter the oceans each year, roughly equivalent to two garbage trucks-full dumped in every minute, according to Oceana. It takes centuries to break down. Horrifying images of dead albatrosses with clusters of colorful plastic spilling from their bodies, turtles eating plastic bags and whales entangled in plastic fishing nets are testament to how this pollution is affecting marine life. 'It's a crisis, and it's rapidly worsening,' said Lavers, who is still reeling from what they found on Lord Howe Island this year. 'I don't have words. I don't know how to explain what it is that I'm seeing.'
Yomiuri Shimbun
17-05-2025
- Science
- Yomiuri Shimbun
On a Remote Australian Island, the Birds Are So Full of Plastic They Crunch
Jennifer Lavers/Adrift Lab Mosaic of plastics ingested by one seabird chick on Lord Howe Island, Australia, including a plastic fork and a blue bottle cap. 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 stomach 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 recently returned 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 impact of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, that has been studying the island's birds, sable shearwaters, for nearly 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 believe 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.' 'A gut-wrenching, crunching sound' Lord Howe Island is home to just 445 people, and is listed on the United Nations World Heritage List for its volcanic landscape and numerous bird species. It is home to about 44,000 sable shearwaters – also known as flesh-footed shearwaters or mutton birds – which breed on the island before chicks fledge the nest and fly to Japan at about 90 days old, Bond said. They then spend up to seven years of their life at sea before returning to the island to breed. Researchers combed the beach for dead birds and carried out necropsies to see the contents of their stomach. They also flushed out the stomachs of live birds with water in a procedure Bond said was harmless. Some of them were found to contain up to 60 grams of plastic – up to 20 percent of their body mass, Bond said. 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.' Jack Rivers-Auty, a lecturer in biomedicine at the University of Tasmania who has been visiting Lord Howe Island for the past five years, said while some are 'crunchy,' others have been dubbed 'brick birds' by the team because their bellies have 'laminated into solid, compact bricks – likely due to their oily marine diet.' 'These terms were once rare and used with a kind of grim novelty. This year, we used them every day,' he said in an email. 'The plastic crisis is accelerating – and demanding more from all of us.' 'Canary in the coal mine' Experts said the findings serve as a 'canary in the coal mine' for other species. 'The things that we're seeing now in sable shearwaters are things that we're absolutely going to see in a lot more species in the years and decades to come,' Bond said. Humans have filled the world's oceans with more than 170 trillion pieces of plastic, according to a major 2023 study, creating a 'plastic smog' that is doubling about every six years. The rate of production is not slowing down, either, with more than 460 million metric tons of plastic produced each year, the equivalent of more than 300,000 blue whales, according to the U.N. Environment Program. Plastic can take hundreds of years to break down, with tiny particles known as microplastics found everywhere, from Antarctic snow to the clouds above Mount Fuji, and inside human bodies. Rivers-Auty said he initially assumed plastic would affect birds in their stomach, liver and kidneys. But the team's findings show it has an impact on 'nearly every organ system.' 'Most disturbingly, the brain appears particularly vulnerable. We're seeing markers of neurodegeneration – similar to dementia – in birds that are less than 100 days old.' He said the team's research shows that even 1 to 2 grams of plastic are enough to trigger serious consequences for the birds, raising questions about exposure among other species. 'We need to ask these questions – urgently, and collectively – because the signs are already here.'
