OceansLive.org is a NOAA outreach program affiliated with Bob Ballard and company. It’s difficult linking directly to their content because it’s partly tied up in Flash. But one of the videos worth noting is under their ARCHIVED VIDEO section. It is a dissection of a dead Laysan Albatross chick on the Kure Atoll. It’s a pretty graphic depiction of the problem of plastic in our oceans. The parents mistake the floating debris for food items and instinctively regurgitate them to the young. The chicks can become so impacted that they die of malnutrition. Or in the case of the bird in the video, the plastic punctured the stomach and acid burned the liver and blackened the lungs.
It is remarkable and sad how much garbage the researchers pull from one dead chick. The other absurdity is just how remote Kure Atoll is from the rest of civilization. It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, but still affected by our conspicuous consumption.
- To see the video, go to oceansLive.org, click ARCHIVED VIDEO, then scroll down to ALBATROSS NECROPSY
- See also, Free Resources for Educators and the Community: “Are Seabirds What They Eat? Plastics and Seabirds†[PDF]
Jason Robertshaw
My friends Ray and Chad often visit Kure as part of NOAA and NMFS clean-up and research efforts. It’s my understanding that Kure (as well an most of the NWHI archipelago) isn’t just in the middle of nowhere. It’s very neatly situated near the center of the North Pacific Gyre. The various currents of the Pacific work together to seemingly concentrate and expunge most of the ocean’s garbage into this area. It’s essentially a natural landfill designated not by county commissioners but by nature. The fact is that the birds probably run into less garbage of this type near many populated areas than they do concentrated out there in the middle of nowhere.
That’s kind of the irony. If people actually lived out there, it would probably be cleaner due to an increased effort to make it habitable. However, the wildlife would then probably not dig all the people around.
Of course, the solution is to try to keep every single bit of garbage from from becoming flotsam. It would be interesting to do a study of how much waste per coastal inhabitant ends up in the NWHI. A study along the lines of “given a hypothetical of 0.01% of say 12 million coastal inhabitants of Asia and North America (have no idea what the figure is) accidentally releasing say 8 oz. of flotsam into the North Pacific Gyre each year and applying say a 75% attrition rate to the stuff making it into the gyre, leaving us with 150 lbs of debris per year sitting on Kure” or something to the like. And how long it’s lifetime is in the Gyre before finding a resting place on a remote island. 5 years? 10 years? 50?
Most of the numerous TONS of pollution they pull from these uninhabited islands each year originates from the Japanese fishing fleets. Ray has an amazing, overflowing collection of Japanese glass ball floats from fishing nets that he has pulled from the trash over the years–some decades old and some fairly new (housed in plastic or rubber). The coolest junk you’ve ever seen.