Abstract
Plastic in the marine environment is a growing environmental issue. Sea turtles are at significant risk of ingesting plastic debris at all stages of their lifecycle with potentially lethal consequences. We tested the relationship between the amount of plastic a turtle has ingested and the likelihood of death, treating animals that died of known causes unrelated to plastic ingestion as a statistical control group. We utilized two datasets; one based on necropsies of 246 sea turtles and a second using 706 records extracted from a national strandings database. Animals dying of known causes unrelated to plastic ingestion had less plastic in their gut than those that died of either indeterminate causes or due to plastic ingestion directly (e.g. via gut impaction and perforation). We found a 50% probability of mortality once an animal had 14 pieces of plastic in its gut. Our results provide the critical link between recent estimates of plastic ingestion and the population effects of this environmental threat.
Highlights
The accumulation and persistence of plastic debris in the marine environment is of increasing concern
Sea turtles were among the first taxa recorded to ingest plastic debris[7,8], a phenomenon that occurs in every region of the world[9] and in all 7 marine turtle species
We found strong support for the two hypotheses we posited with respect to plastic ingestion based on our necropsy data
Summary
The accumulation and persistence of plastic debris in the marine environment is of increasing concern. An estimated 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tonnes of plastic debris entered the world’s oceans from land-based sources in 2010 alone, with this input likely to increase exponentially into the future[1] This poses a considerable threat to marine life, primarily through entanglement and ingestion[2,3]. Turtles in coastal environments die of many different causes, including non-plastic-related reasons such as boat strikes and entanglement in fishing nets. We used these animals as a control group, assuming their mortality was random with respect to the amount of plastic they ingested. We utilized all turtles in the dataset to estimate the relationship between the probability of death due to plastic ingestion and the concentration of plastic in the animal’s gut
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