Ocean's garbage content appalls bird researchers
Guy Kovner
Press Democrat
10/14/2011
From their nests in the sand on tiny atolls in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Black-footed albatross fly 2,800 miles to the food-rich waters off the Sonoma coast.
But the vital nourishment the big ocean birds regurgitate for their chicks back in Hawaii is laced with plastic fragments, bags and fishing line, as well as cigarette lighters, toothbrushes, toy soldiers and syringes scavenged from the ocean surface.
“We're all really appalled by what we find,” said David Hyrenbach, an Oahu-based oceanographer with Oikonos, a nonprofit environmental organization.
Plastic refuse turns up in the stomachs of every dead albatross chick and in all the pellets vomited up by live chicks and found by researchers, he said.
The albatross' experience mirrors both the biological wealth of the local coast and the increasing human impact on ocean waters, including pollution and climate change.
“For so many years, the ocean was thought of as a good place to get rid of stuff,” said Dan Howard, superintendent of the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary.
Discovery of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the late 1990s — comprised mostly of tiny plastic particles suspended in the water — proved the ocean's unsuitability as a trash can.
Scientists are attempting to trace the origin of plastics found in the Hawaiian albatross, and its possible impact on mortality of the endangered seabird, Hyrenbach said.
Closer to home, experts are assessing two impacts of climate change on one of the world's most abundant marine ecosystems: ocean acidification and a change in the wind.
