90% of seabirds now eating plastic

 About 90 percent of the world's seabirds today have consumed some form of plastic, a study estimated Monday.

The study, published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is important in revealing the pervasive impact of plastic on seabirds.

"This is a huge amount and really points to the ubiquity of plastic pollution," lead author Chris Wilcox, a senior research scientist at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) Oceans and Atmosphere Business Unit, said in a statement.

The investigators' analysis of studies published since the early 1960s showed that plastic is increasingly common in seabirds' stomachs.

In 1960, plastic was found in the stomachs of less than five percent of seabirds; by 2010 that figure had risen to 80 percent.

Based on current trends, the researchers predicted that plastic ingestion will affect 99 percent of the world's seabird species by 2050.

The plethora of plastic comes from bags, bottle caps and plastic fibers from synthetic clothes that have washed out into the ocean from urban rivers, sewers and waste deposits.

Birds mistake the brightly colored items for food or swallow them by accident, and this causes gut impaction, weight loss and sometimes death, they said.

The researchers also found that the highest area of potential impact might be in the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand.

There was still the opportunity to change the impact plastic had on seabirds, they noted.

"Improving waste management can reduce the threat plastic is posing to marine wildlife," said study coauthor Denise Hardesty from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Business Unit.

"Even simple measures can make a difference," she said. "Efforts to reduce plastics losses into the environment in Europe resulted in measureable changes in plastic in seabird stomachs with less than a decade, which suggests that improvements in basic waste management can reduce plastic in the environment in a really short time."