#wildlife-mortality

#wildlife-mortality

"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.