Our oceans into a toxic soup
decades and has noticed rapid declines as increasing amounts of plastic enter the oceans. The birds become entangled in fishing gear and drown or unwittingly feed plastic to their chicks.
Lucy Quinn, of the BAS, said: “It’s only through looking at long-term studies that you get a sense of these creatures, and the albatrosses here have over the past 10 years been in decline.
“Albatrosses have the ability to cough up food they can’t digest and from that we can tell what they’ve been eating. A healthy albatross chick should really be having things like squid, so we find the squid beaks that come out of the pellet, and also fish, so we can find fish bones.
“We found a plastic bag and some food packaging. It looks like rice. Luckily for this chick he has managed to get this plastic out of its stomach.”
However, another chick was not so lucky.
“Unfortunately, there was a plastic toothpick which had gone through the stomach,” said Quinn. “Something as small as that has managed to kill the bird.”
Attenborough said: “For years we thought that the oceans were so vast and the inhabitants so infinitely numerous that nothing we could do could have an effect upon them. But now we know that was wrong. The oceans are under threat now as never before in human history.”
— Telegraph Group Ltd