Scientists find tiny amounts can be a ‘fatal dose’ for marine life in the most comprehensive study of its kind
Ingesting less than three sugar cubes worth of plastic is enough to kill a puffin, a new study has found.
Scientists measured how much different kinds of plastic seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals have to ingest to have a 90% risk of it killing them, in the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists, working for Ocean Conservancy, found that a relatively small amount of plastic was enough to kill a variety of marine animals. It is the most comprehensive study yet to quantify the extent to which a range of plastic, from soft, flexible types such as bags and food wrappers, to hard plastics ranging from fragments to whole items such as beverage bottles, result in the death of creatures that ingest them.
“We’ve long known that ocean creatures of all shapes and sizes are eating plastics; what we set out to understand was how much is too much,” said Dr Erin Murphy, Ocean Conservancy’s manager of ocean plastics research and lead author of the study. “The lethal dose varies based on the species, the animal’s size and the type of plastic it’s consuming, but overall it’s much smaller than you may might think, which is troubling when you consider that more than a garbage truck’s worth of plastics enters the ocean every minute.”
