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Size of marine debris items ingested and retained by petrels
Citation
Roman, L and Paterson, H and Townsend, KA and Wilcox, C and Hardesty, BD and Hindell, MA, Size of marine debris items ingested and retained by petrels, Marine Pollution Bulletin, 142 pp. 569-575. ISSN 0025-326X (2019) [Refereed Article]
Copyright Statement
Crown Copyright © 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
DOI: doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2019.04.021
Abstract
Pollution of the world's oceans by marine debris has direct consequences for wildlife, with fragments of plastic <10 mm the most abundant buoyant litter in the ocean. Seabirds are susceptible to debris ingestion, commonly mistaking floating plastics for food. Studies have shown that half of petrel species regularly ingest anthropogenic waste. Despite the regularity of debris ingestion, no studies to date have quantified the dimensions of debris items ingested across petrel species ranging in size. We excised and measured 1694 rigid anthropogenic debris items from 348 petrel carcasses of 20 species. We found that although the size of items ingested by petrels scale positively with the size of the bird, 90% of all debris items ingested across species fall within a narrow "danger zone" range of 2–10 mm, overlapping with the most abundant oceanic debris size. We conclude that this globally profuse size range of marine plastics is an ingestion hazard to petrels.
Item Details
Item Type: | Refereed Article |
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Keywords: | seabirds, plastic, marine debris, diet, plastic ingestion, pollution, shearwater, Procellariiform |
Research Division: | Earth Sciences |
Research Group: | Oceanography |
Research Field: | Biological oceanography |
Objective Division: | Environmental Management |
Objective Group: | Terrestrial systems and management |
Objective Field: | Assessment and management of terrestrial ecosystems |
UTAS Author: | Roman, L (Dr Lauren Roman) |
UTAS Author: | Hindell, MA (Professor Mark Hindell) |
ID Code: | 136820 |
Year Published: | 2019 |
Web of Science® Times Cited: | 5 |
Deposited By: | Ecology and Biodiversity |
Deposited On: | 2020-01-20 |
Last Modified: | 2020-04-29 |
Downloads: | 0 |
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