Why can't marine animals stop eating plastic garbage?

Plastic waste not only looks like food but smells, noises, the feeling they bring is similar to food.

According to the BBC, in a recent interview, David Attenborough - a naturalist, a famous English conservationist, described the moment a great albatross returned to nest to feed young birds. .

Even in the most deserted seas, you can find plastic garbage - (Photo: BBC).

"Guess what the parent bird releases from the mouth to the young bird? Not the fish, not the ink. It's the plastic," he said.

This is very sad and also very strange. Seagulls must fly thousands of kilometers in the sea to find food. They easily catch prey on the water thanks to skilled skills. But how can this bird be easily confused, and go back to the nest with plastic in its mouth?

Seagulls are not separate cases. It is noted that at least 180 marine animals have eaten plastic, from small planktons to huge whales.

Plastics are found inside the stomach of a third of the fish caught in the UK, including those we normally consume such as lobster, clams, oysters. In short, small to large marine animals continue to eat plastic, and with 12.7 million tons of plastic being released into the ocean each year (estimated), the problem is getting worse.

Eating plastic is one of the consequences that the huge amount of plastic said. For example, in the world of zooplankton, these tiny tiny organisms feed on micro-plastic particles because their stomachs evolved to handle small pieces of food.

"Anything that is so small, they will equate with food," said Moira Galbraith, a plankton researcher at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Canada.

Like plankton, tentacles, lozenges like sea cucumbers don't seem to care about what they eat because they simply move under the sea floor, gathering objects that settle down to the surface. face that fits in size to filter out food.

A report pointed out that the percentage of bottom-dwelling animals that eat plastic is 138 times more because plastic is also contained in sediments down the sea floor.

With sea cucumbers, plastic debris will be bigger and easier for their tentacles to be compared to regular food, but for others, they don't eat plastic so passively. Many species even chose to eat plastic. To understand why, we need to stand in their perspective.

Matthew Savoca at the Southwestern NOAA Aquatic Science Center in California, said: "Animals possess senses and cognitive abilities that are different from ours. In some cases, this is more effective or bad. than".

One explanation says that animals simply confuse plastic pieces with regular food - like fish eggs, for example. But we often subjectively judge everything with our common sense. Therefore, the scientific community had to try to look at the problem of the eyes of animals.

Many animals even chose to eat plastic.(Photo: BBC).

Humans depend on sight, and many marine animals, including seagulls, rely heavily on their sense of smell. Savoca and his colleagues tested and found that seabirds or fish attracted by plastic were due to odor factors.

Specifically, they found the chemical dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a compound capable of attracting birds, appearing on pieces of plastic floating in the sea. Algae grow on plastic, then krill (a small crustacean) will eat algae - the main food source of many marine organisms, and release surrounding DMS. And then it leads to plastic feeding of seabirds and fish.

When it comes to sight, we cannot rush to conclude that plastic garbage is the cause. Like humans, sea turtles use sight to find food. Even so, they possess the ability to see UV news, different from humans.

To clarify the problem, Qamar Schuyler at the University of Queensland, Australia recreated the sea turtle's ability to see through experiments, and monitored the shape of plastic bags under the eyes of turtles. She also conducts gastric examination of dead turtles to make assumptions about the type of plastic bags they normally eat.

She concluded that gastric plastic in small turtles often varied. And larger turtles preferred to eat soft and translucent plastic bags. Schuyler said this confirmed the idea that sea turtles mistook plastic bags for jellyfish - their food.

Colors are also considered to be factors that make marine creatures eat plastic, although habitual behavior varies among species. Schuyler found that small turtles preferred white plastic bags, and a seabird often ate red plastic pieces.

Every year, about 8 million tons of plastic waste is discharged into the ocean - (Photo: BBC).

In addition to sight and smell, there are other species like whales and dolphins that use ultrasound to find food. Ultrasound is known to be extremely sensitive, but there are cases where whales are found dead with stomachs full of plastic garbage, car parts . Savaco said it seems that ultrasound has confused objects that's food.

Savoca continued: "A common misconception is that these animals are not smart enough and eat plastic trash just because plastic trash is all around them, this is not true.

Their hunting instincts are extremely miraculous due to the evolution of millions of years to focus on finding specific foods. Sadly, even though it only appeared shortly, plastic appeared in their "menu".

Schuyler recounts a person who asked her why people don't create blue plastic, because the conclusion in her study suggests that sea turtles are not interested in this color. But other studies show that other marine species are attracted to blue.

So what to do to stop marine life from eating plastic? Savoca hopes that sad stories like David Attenborough above will help raise consumer awareness and they will limit the use of non-biodegradable plastics and at the same time encourage compassion to marine animals. . The amount of plastic waste discharged into the ocean will gradually decrease thanks to that.