Abstract
Fulmars are effective biological indicators of the abundance of floating plastic marine debris. Long-term data reveal high plastic abundance in the southern North Sea, gradually decreasing to the north at increasing distance from population centres, with lowest levels in high-arctic waters. Since the 1980s, pre-production plastic pellets in North Sea fulmars have decreased by ∼75%, while user plastics varied without a strong overall change. Similar trends were found in net-collected floating plastic debris in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, with a ∼75% decrease in plastic pellets and no obvious trend in user plastic. The decreases in pellets suggest that changes in litter input are rapidly visible in the environment not only close to presumed sources, but also far from land. Floating plastic debris is rapidly “lost” from the ocean surface to other as-yet undetermined sinks in the marine environment.
Highlights
Ingestion of marine debris by wildlife, and that of plastics by seabirds in particular, has been widely documented
In order for stomach contents to reflect location-specific pollution levels, birds must forage in a certain area for time periods long enough to integrate debris encounters, and plastics must disappear from the stomach quickly enough to ensure that amounts of debris regain a new local balance when the birds migrate to another area
Most plastic particles accumulate in the muscular gizzard, where all hard food or debris items are ground up until they wear down or fragment into sizes small enough to pass into the intestines
Summary
Ingestion of marine debris by wildlife, and that of plastics by seabirds in particular, has been widely documented. The northern fulmar Fulmarus glacialis was among the earliest seabird species reported to ingest marine plastic debris. Fulmars belong to the tubenosed bird families of albatrosses and petrels (Procellariiformes). They only come ashore to breed and never forage on land or in fresh water but exclusively far out to sea. An abundance of 1e2 particles per fulmar stomach in the North Sea in the early 1970s (Bourne, 1976) changed to more than 10 plastic particles per stomach by the 1980s (Furness, 1985; Van Franeker, 1985). Close relatives of the fulmar living in the Antarctic had still lower levels of ingested plastics, in which species migrating to northern areas during winter contained more plastic than the resident species living in pristine Antarctic waters year round (Van Franeker and Bell, 1988)
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