This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Ocean plastic pollution is accidentally on the menu for southern giant petrel chicks. Even small nibbles of it may affect their physiology during development, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, and Argentina's National Research Council (CONICET).
Southern giant petrels are not of high conservation concern globally, but they are particularly susceptible and useful sentinels for understanding how ocean plastic pollution affects wildlife. With a range stretching from Antarctica to Chile, Argentina, Africa and Australia, these large birds frequently forage at the sea surface, where floating plastic tends to accumulate. Adults can accidentally transfer plastic they eat to their chicks when they regurgitate food.
The study, published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, detected plastics in more than 71% of chicks. This suggests that most petrel chicks are inadvertently fed plastic by their parents. To understand the effects of ingesting plastic on the chicks' health, the researchers sampled and examined southern giant petrel chicks at two key stages of development during 2022 and 2023 in Patagonia, Argentina.
"We found that it doesn't take a stomach full of plastic to leave a biological signal," said corresponding author Marcela Uhart, a wildlife veterinarian with the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine and its Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center. The amount of plastic recovered was small relative to the body mass of the chicks.
Yet even at these low levels, eating plastic was associated with potentially adverse changes in the health of young chicks, especially for those around 1 month old. The health changes were related to nutrition, body condition, metabolism, liver and muscle function and immune response. "What surprised us was not just how many chicks had plastic, but how little plastic it took for us to detect a biological signal," said first author Luciana Gallo from CONICET.
"Counting the pieces of plastic only tells us part of the story. These chicks appeared healthy, and the amount of plastic we recovered was tiny, yet we could still see changes in indicators related to nutrition, metabolism and immune function." By the time the chicks were close to fledging, at around 3 months old, most of these changes had weakened or disappeared. Whether that means the chicks compensated as they grew or that plastic exposure and physiological responses operate on different timescales remains an important unanswered question, the authors note.
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