New research shows that seabirds’ ingestion of the pollutant scars their insides—a new disease called “plasticosis”—and may disturb their microbiomes.
New research shows that seabirds’ ingestion of the pollutant scars their insides—a new disease called “plasticosis”—and may disturb their microbiomes.
Northern fulmars and Cory’s shearwaters are masters of the sea and air, gliding above the waves and plunging into the water to snag fish, squid, and crustaceans. But because humans have so thoroughly corrupted the ocean with microplastics—at least 11 billion pounds of particles float at the surface, and that’s likely a huge underestimate—their diet now also includes substantial amounts of synthetic poison.
A study published today in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution shows that those microplastics (defined as particles under 5 millimeters long) might be altering the seabirds’ gut microbiomes, with as-yet-unknown implications for their health. Another recent paper introduced the world to “plasticosis”: severe scarring in the digestive system of birds that had eaten plastic. With plastic pollution increasing exponentially along with plastic production, the new papers are a hint of the suffering to come.
The researchers behind today’s paper dissected 85 northern fulmars and Cory’s shearwaters caught in the wild. (Northern fulmars live around northern oceans and the Arctic; Cory’s shearwaters throughout the Atlantic.) Then the team flushed plastic particles out of the birds’ digestive tracts, looking for bits as small as 1 millimeter, and analyzed the species of microbes in the gut. When the researchers analyzed microplastics in the birds by mass, the greater the mass, the lower the gut microbiome diversity. But when they counted the number of plastic particles, “the more particles there were, the more diverse the microbiome was,” says Gloria Fackelmann, a microbiome biologist at Ulm University in Germany, and lead author of the study. In this case, diversity isn’t necessarily a good thing: The more particles, the more pathogenic and antibiotic-resistant microbes the researchers found in the gut.
Read more at Wired
Photo Credit: asfafi via Pixabay
