The problem with plastic: Waves of junk are flowing into food chain
By: Paula Bock/The Seattle Times
Issue date: 5/4/06 Section: News
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SEATTLE - Something red caught Ellen Anderson's eye. Something sharp and bright, out of place amidst the muted colors and gentle rhythms of the dunes.
Anderson stepped off the little path that wound from her Ocean Park weekend house to a sandy stretch along the Washington coast. She parted the long beach grasses. She stared, shocked: a dead bird, its exposed belly filled with shiny bits of plastic. Chunks yellowed like old teeth, a perforated pink rectangle, hairy tan slivers. A red shard had first captured her attention.
"My gut hurt. It was a glorious day, sunny, a treasure in May. Everything was great. And then I saw that bird and I was sick to my stomach," Anderson recently recalled. "You jump to conclusions. Like, did the bird eat all that plastic? I was hoping it hadn't been consumed by the bird, that somebody planted it there as a joke or something."
But it was no joke. Back in Seattle, where she's a computer analyst for Group Health, Anderson e-mailed photographs of the bird's carcass to experts at the University of Washington, Department of Fish and Wildlife, State Parks, Ocean Conservancy and Willapa National Wildlife Refuge.
"Yes - Ellen - it is just as you suspected," wrote the Conservancy's Charles Barr, in a reply echoed by the others. "Seabirds are eating plastics that become lodged in their stomachs, causing death. I have seen dozens of photos such as this one - most of ... dead albatross on the Pacific Islands of Midway and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. ... Many of the albatross will even return to their nests to feed, by regurgitation, plastics to their chicks."
To fully understand the big deal over Anderson's dead bird, you need to know it was not a seagull. It was a Northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), identified by a tube atop its beak that spurts out excess salt. Like albatross and other pelagic seabirds, fulmars spend their whole lives way, way out in the ocean, coming to shore only during summer breeding, when females lay a single white egg on cliffs.
Anderson stepped off the little path that wound from her Ocean Park weekend house to a sandy stretch along the Washington coast. She parted the long beach grasses. She stared, shocked: a dead bird, its exposed belly filled with shiny bits of plastic. Chunks yellowed like old teeth, a perforated pink rectangle, hairy tan slivers. A red shard had first captured her attention.
"My gut hurt. It was a glorious day, sunny, a treasure in May. Everything was great. And then I saw that bird and I was sick to my stomach," Anderson recently recalled. "You jump to conclusions. Like, did the bird eat all that plastic? I was hoping it hadn't been consumed by the bird, that somebody planted it there as a joke or something."
But it was no joke. Back in Seattle, where she's a computer analyst for Group Health, Anderson e-mailed photographs of the bird's carcass to experts at the University of Washington, Department of Fish and Wildlife, State Parks, Ocean Conservancy and Willapa National Wildlife Refuge.
"Yes - Ellen - it is just as you suspected," wrote the Conservancy's Charles Barr, in a reply echoed by the others. "Seabirds are eating plastics that become lodged in their stomachs, causing death. I have seen dozens of photos such as this one - most of ... dead albatross on the Pacific Islands of Midway and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. ... Many of the albatross will even return to their nests to feed, by regurgitation, plastics to their chicks."
To fully understand the big deal over Anderson's dead bird, you need to know it was not a seagull. It was a Northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), identified by a tube atop its beak that spurts out excess salt. Like albatross and other pelagic seabirds, fulmars spend their whole lives way, way out in the ocean, coming to shore only during summer breeding, when females lay a single white egg on cliffs.
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