Three sugar cubes worth of plastic enough to kill a puffin, study finds

"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."

"We've long known that ocean creatures of all shapes and sizes are eating plastics; what we set out to understand was how much is too much, said Dr Erin Murphy, Ocean Conservancy's manager of ocean plastics research and lead author of the study. The lethal dose varies based on the species, the animal's size and the type of plastic it's consuming, but overall it's much smaller than you may might think, which is troubling when you consider that more than a garbage truck's worth of plastics enters the ocean every minute."

Measurements quantified lethal ingestion thresholds for seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals, showing amounts that produce a 90% mortality risk. Different plastic types—from soft flexible items like bags and wrappers to hard fragments and whole items such as bottles—pose lethal hazards at small volumes. Lethal doses vary by species, body size, and plastic type, but are generally much smaller than expected. Examples include less than three sugar cubes for a puffin, about two baseballs' worth for loggerhead sea turtles, and roughly a football's worth for some marine mammals. Floating plastics often resemble prey and are accidentally eaten.

Read at www.theguardian.com