The LA Times is running a five part series titled ALTERED OCEANS -
charting marine deterioration at
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-oceans-
series,0,7842752.special
This excerpt comes from part 4 - today's article
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-
ocean2aug02,0,71579,full.story
PLAGUE OF PLASTIC CHOKES THE SEAS
On Midway Atoll, 40% of albatross chicks die, their bellies full of
trash. Swirling masses of drifting debris pollute remote beaches and
snare wildlife.
By Kenneth R. Weiss
Times Staff Writer
August 2, 2006
The albatross chick jumped to its feet, eyes alert and focused. At 5
months, it stood 18 inches tall and was fully feathered except for the
fuzz that fringed its head.
All attitude, the chick straightened up and clacked its beak at a
visitor, then rocked back and dangled webbed feet in the air to cool
them in the afternoon breeze.
The next afternoon, the chick ignored passersby. The bird was flopped
on its belly, its legs splayed awkwardly. Its wings drooped in the hot
sun. A few hours later, the chick was dead.
John Klavitter, a wildlife biologist, turned the bird over and cut it
open with a knife. Probing its innards with a gloved hand, he pulled
out a yellowish sac — its stomach.
Out tumbled a collection of red, blue and orange bottle caps, a black
spray nozzle, part of a green comb, a white golf tee and a clump of
tiny dark squid beaks ensnared in a tangle of fishing line.
"This is pretty typical," said Klavitter, who is stationed at the atoll
for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "We often find cigarette
lighters, bucket handles, toothbrushes, syringes, toy soldiers —
anything made out of plastic."
It's all part of a tide of plastic debris that has spread throughout
the world's oceans, posing a lethal hazard to wildlife, even here, more
than 1,000 miles from the nearest city.
Midway, an atoll halfway between North America and Japan, has no
industrial centers, no fast-food joints with overflowing trash cans,
and only a few dozen people.
Its isolation would seem to make it an ideal rookery for seabirds,
especially Laysan albatross, which lay their eggs and hatch their young
here each winter. For their first six months of life, the chicks depend
entirely on their parents for nourishment. The adults forage at sea and
bring back high-calorie takeout: a slurry of partly digested squid and
flying-fish eggs.
As they scour the ocean surface for this sustenance, albatross
encounter vast expanses of floating junk. They pick up all manner of
plastic debris, mistaking it for food.
As a result, the regurgitated payload flowing down their chicks'
gullets now includes Lego blocks, clothespins, fishing lures and other
pieces of plastic that can perforate the stomach or block the gizzard
or esophagus. The sheer volume of plastic inside a chick can leave
little room for food and liquid.
Of the 500,000 albatross chicks born here each year, about 200,000 die,
mostly from dehydration or starvation. A two-year study funded by the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed that chicks that died from
those causes had twice as much plastic in their stomachs as those that
died for other reasons.
The atoll is littered with decomposing remains, grisly wreaths of
feathers and bone surrounding colorful piles of bottle caps, plastic
dinosaurs, checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles, fishing line
and small Styrofoam balls. Klavitter has calculated that albatross feed
their chicks about 5 tons of plastic a year at Midway.
Albatross fly hundreds of miles in their search for food for their
young. Their flight paths from Midway often take them over what is
perhaps the world's largest dump: a slowly rotating mass of trash-laden
water about twice the size of Texas.
This is known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, part of a system of
currents called the North Pacific subtropical gyre. Located halfway
between San Francisco and Hawaii, the garbage patch is an area of slack
winds and sluggish currents where flotsam collects from around the
Pacific, much like foam piling up in the calm center of a hot tub.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been studying the clockwise swirl of plastic
debris so long, he talks about it as if he were tracking a beast.
"It moves around like a big animal without a leash," said Ebbesmeyer,
an oceanographer in Seattle and leading expert on currents and marine
debris. "When it gets close to an island, the garbage patch barfs, and
you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic."
Some oceanic trash washes ashore at Midway — laundry baskets,
television tubes, beach sandals, soccer balls and other discards.
Nearly 90% of floating marine litter is plastic — supple, durable
materials such as polyethylene and polypropylene, Styrofoam, nylon and
saran.
About four-fifths of marine trash comes from land, swept by wind or
washed by rain off highways and city streets, down streams and rivers,
and out to sea.
The rest comes from ships. Much of it consists of synthetic floats and
other gear that is jettisoned illegally to avoid the cost of proper
disposal in port.
In addition, thousands of cargo containers fall overboard in stormy
seas each year, spilling their contents. One ship heading from Los
Angeles to Tacoma, Wash., disgorged 33,000 blue-and-white Nike
basketball shoes in 2002. Other loads lost at sea include 34,000 hockey
gloves and 29,000 yellow rubber ducks and other bathtub toys.
The debris can spin for decades in one of a dozen or more gigantic
gyres around the globe, only to be spat out and carried by currents to
distant lands. The U.N. Environment Program estimates that 46,000
pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the
oceans. About 70% will eventually sink.
Albatross are by no means the only victims. An estimated 1 million
seabirds choke or get tangled in plastic nets or other debris every
year. About 100,000 seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, other marine
mammals and sea turtles suffer the same fate.
< snip >
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