Seabird on Lord Howe Island found with record 894 pieces of plastic

Researchers studying seabirds on Australia’s Lord Howe Island have discovered a dead sable shearwater containing 894 pieces of plastic. The plastic waste weighed 64.2 grams, accounting for approximately 15% of the bird's body weight.

A study published in Earth’s Future, utilizing 16 years of data, indicates a sharp increase in plastic ingestion among seabirds. This trend aligns with the rising volume of plastic waste in the oceans. Researchers noted that the record for the highest number of plastic pieces found in a single bird has been broken annually since 2023.

In 2012, scientists previously believed a bird containing 276 pieces of plastic represented a worst-case scenario. Dr. Alex Bond, a co-author of the study and principal curator of birds at the Natural History Museum, stated that the crisis is worsening and that current efforts to address the problem are not keeping pace with the scale of the issue. The ingestion occurs when adult birds mistake floating plastic for food and inadvertently feed it to their chicks.