On a remote Australian island, the birds are so full of plastic they crunch

On a remote Australian island renowned for its natural beauty, researchers have made a grisly discovery: Seabirds have ingested so much plastic they crunch when touched.

The “harrowing” finding of plastic in the stomach of birds including chicks less than 3 months old is a stark warning for the health of other species in the marine environment, said ecologist Alex Bond, principal curator at Britain’s Natural History Museum.

Bond recently returned from a visit to Lord Howe Island, a remote territory about 360 miles off Australia’s east coast. He is part of a team of researchers from Adrift Lab, a global unit that studies the impact of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, that has been studying the island’s birds, sable shearwaters, for nearly two decades.

The latest trip led to the discovery of a dead bird with 778 individual pieces of plastic packed into its stomach “like a brick,” Bond said. It beat last year’s grim record in which a bird was found to contain about 400 pieces. The researchers believe the seabirds have been fishing pieces of plastic from the ocean and feeding them to their chicks.

“This isn’t microplastics,” Bond said in a phone interview Thursday. “We’re talking items up to and including the size of bottle caps and tetra pack lids, cutlery, clothes pegs, the takeaway soy sauce fish bottle that you get from restaurants. … That’s the sort of thing that we’re finding in the stomachs of these 80-day-old chicks.”

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‘A gut-wrenching, crunching sound’

Lord Howe Island is home to just 445 people, and is listed on the United Nations World Heritage List for its volcanic landscape and numerous bird species. It is home to about 44,000 sable shearwaters — also known as flesh-footed shearwaters or mutton birds — which breed on the island before chicks fledge the nest and fly to Japan at about 90 days old, Bond said. They then spend up to seven years of their life at sea before returning to the island to breed.

Researchers combed the beach for dead birds and carried out necropsies to see the contents of their stomach. They also flushed out the stomachs of live birds with water in a procedure Bond said was harmless. Some of them were found to contain up to 60 grams of plastic — up to 20% of their body mass, Bond said.

The plastic is being fed to chicks by their parents, who mistake it for food while out fishing in the Tasman Sea because of the chemical signal it emits, he explained. “These birds eat fish and squid, and, you know, the pieces that we pull out, there’s no way that that would be sort of accidentally attached … to a prey item,” he said.

The plastic makes a “gut-wrenching, crunching sound” that can be heard by pressing just below the bird’s sternum — similar to where a belly button would be on a human, Bond said. “In the most severely impacted birds you can hear that while they are still alive.”

Jack Rivers-Auty, a lecturer in biomedicine at the University of Tasmania who has been visiting Lord Howe Island for the past five years, said while some are “crunchy,” others have been dubbed “brick birds” by the team because their bellies have “laminated into solid, compact bricks — likely due to their oily marine diet.”

“These terms were once rare and used with a kind of grim novelty. This year, we used them every day,” he said in an email. “The plastic crisis is accelerating — and demanding more from all of us.”

‘Canary in the coal mine’

Experts said the findings serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for other species. “The things that we’re seeing now in sable shearwaters are things that we’re absolutely going to see in a lot more species in the years and decades to come,” Bond said.

Humans have filled the world’s oceans with more than 170 trillion pieces of plastic, according to a major 2023 study, creating a “plastic smog” that is doubling about every six years.

The rate of production is not slowing down, either, with more than 460 million metric tons of plastic produced each year, the equivalent of more than 300,000 blue whales, according to the U.N. Environment Program. Plastic can take hundreds of years to break down, with tiny particles known as microplastics found everywhere, from Antarctic snow to the clouds above Mount Fuji, and inside human bodies.

Rivers-Auty said he initially assumed plastic would affect birds in their stomach, liver and kidneys. But the team’s findings show it has an impact on “nearly every organ system.”

“Most disturbingly, the brain appears particularly vulnerable. We’re seeing markers of neurodegeneration — similar to dementia — in birds that are less than 100 days old.” He said the team’s research shows that even 1 to 2 grams of plastic are enough to trigger serious consequences for the birds, raising questions about exposure among other species.

“We need to ask these questions — urgently, and collectively — because the signs are already here.”