Promoted as “Just Paradise”, Lord Howe Island hundreds of kilometers east of Australia is a unique environment that houses plants and fauna found anywhere else in the world.
This remains virgin and far from an old volcano is also the nesting site of a distant seabird species which has become a victim signature of the large quantities of plastic waste entering the oceans.
A recent study by Australian researchers has provided alarming evidence of the load of plastics for wildlife. It indicates profound changes in shear chicks in sandy nourished in plastic by their parents – signs of defaulting organs to brain lesions which could harm the ability to mate.
Each year, dead birds are washing on the beaches of Lord Howe Island, sometimes in their hundreds, with what researchers say they are serious symptoms of swallowing large quantities of plastic – emaciation, feathers and underlying deformations.
For their study, the researchers turned their attention to shear chicks that seemed to be healthy externally to understand what deeper changes could occur.
“These apparently healthy chicks are already compromised,” said Jack Rivers-Auty, an immune system expert at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tasmania. “We see now it reflected in poorer survival results and weight trajectories over time,” he told Radio Free Asia.
“By studying birds that seem well external, we can more clearly assess the hidden impact of plastic on their survival and their long-term physiology,” he said.
Lord Howe is close to the current of Australia East which carries the hot waters of the Corail Sea to the south. The relatively immobile ocean swirls that form on the current are places where floating debris, including plastics, can accumulate in debris rafts. The shearwaters probably confuse objects with prey, in particular calmars, a main part of their diet – ingest them themselves and feed it with their offspring.
The migration of birds leads them to most of the Pacific Ocean, that Jennifer Provencher, a conservation biologist not involved in the study, said that they “have an incredible exposure to plastics for all their life cycle”.
The stress of ingesting a lot of plastic – that the species, unlike the Goélands, cannot regurgitate not assisted – is probably also manifested in hormonal changes which alter the robustness of eggs and chicks, said Provencher to RFA.
“It is a combination of the inability of this bird to make things go back and the fact that they live and migrate throughout the Pacific Ocean,” she said.
The study uses “very cool” techniques, said Provencher, but more research is necessary to assess the relevance for sea birds in general, which are in number in the hundreds of species.
“It’s difficult to generalize,” she said. “An understanding of a greater understanding is necessary for the application of this work beyond this species and this place.”
Practical and inexpensive, plastics are produced in growing volumes and found in all corners and corners of daily life – fragile stools of street food stands in Southeast Asia to the component of sophisticated smartphones and hundreds of billions of water bottles and plastic bags rejected in the world each year after only a few seconds.
Most of the time, plastic waste has a lifespan of centuries and gives an increasing number of tolls on the environment, including in the oceans where it hurts and kills marine life and birds.
Oil producers, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, have slowed down negotiations on an international treaty to control plastic waste at a ramp.
In April and May 2023, Australian researchers captured shearwater chicks with healthy air on the island of Lord Howe and rinsed the stomach with water – a technique known as gastric washing – to induce regurgitation.
If they vomit less than five pieces of plastic or 0.5 gram in total, they were classified as being less in exposed plastic and vice versa.
A vomit chick in place 403 pieces of plastic.
Using a relatively new technique, the blood of the chicks has been analyzed for a range of protein and other signatures, which provided revealing signs of greater health effects for chicks that had larger quantities of plastic in their stomach.
The cellular content which should not be found in the blood has been frequently detected, which, according to the researchers, was indicative of the degradation of the cells.
The proteins secreted by organs were less abundant, which indicates that the stomach, the liver and the kidneys did not function normally, according to the study.
Signatures included evidence of neurodegeneration in chicks of less than three months which have the potential to affect the “song control system” of birds – crucial to identify the opposite sex and nuptial parade.
The researchers’ theory is that swallowed plastic loses very small fragments called microplastics transported in the organs.
Another possibility of plastic chemicals is another possibility.
“It’s a bit like smoking: from the outside, a smoker can be good, but internally, important health problems often develop,” said Auty.
“We have documented plastic articles from the whole Pacific, including debris with non -English writing, which shows how far these plastics travel,” said Auty.
“It’s not just local pollution. It is a global problem that rises and circulates in the region. ”
Published by Mike Firn and Tajun Kang.