This is exceptionally rapid detection of an outbreak in free-ranging marine mammals, said professor Christine Johnson, director of the Institute for Pandemic Insights at UC Davis' Weill School of Veterinary Medicine. We have most likely identified the very first cases here because of coordinated teams that have been on high alert with active surveillance for this disease for some time.
The record-breaking arctic blast that hit Florida earlier this month may have sent humans scurrying for winter coats, but it sent wildlife scurrying, swimming and slithering for their lives. Some of those animals were native, some were invasive. Some survived. Thousands of others did not. The benchmark for cold snaps in Florida is the 2010 freeze, which killed manatees, crocodiles, iguanas, thousands of snook and goliath grouper, and caused 50% to 90% of invasive pythons to die in some areas.
"What surprised me the most is how little it takes to become deadly," said Britta Baechler, a co-author of the study and director of Ocean Plastics Research at the Ocean Conservancy. Less than three sugar cubes' worth of plastic could kill an Atlantic puffin. Two baseballs' worth would do in a sea turtle. The equivalent of a soccer ball is enough to off a seal or dolphin. "For seabirds, ingesting just six tiny pieces of rubber, each smaller than about the size of a pea, can result in a 90 percent chance of death," Baechler said.
Ingesting less than three sugar cubes worth of plastic is enough to kill a puffin, a new study has found. Scientists measured how much different kinds of plastic seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals have to ingest to have a 90% risk of it killing them, in the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists, working for Ocean Conservancy, found that a relatively small amount of plastic was enough to kill a variety of marine animals.
