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Many birds accidentally eat plastic and other marine debris floating in the ocean, mistaking it for food. But the problem is intensified in Laysan albatrosses because of the way they catch fish, squid and other seafood: by skimming the surface of the water with their beak. Along the way, they accidentally pick up a lot of floating plastic, which they then feed to their chicks. The effects of plastic on the chicks hasn't been scientifically proven. On Midway Atoll, many albatross chicks are killed by lead poisoning , making it hard to separate the effects of the plastic from that of the lead.
These photos makes a powerful statement about just how far-reaching the impacts of human consumption are, as they affect birds thousands of miles away, isolated in the Pacific Ocean.
You can help: pay attention to how much plastic you throw away—grocery bags, Styrofoam cups, water bottles, packaging—and try to use less. Here are five more simple things you can do for the ocean. These photos portray baby albatrosses, which are fed the plastic by their parents.
Gabrielle Nevitt , an ornithologist at the University of California, Davis, has been studying albatrosses and the relationship of olfaction to food finding. Early on, it was discovered that air and water samples downwind from masses of plankton contained dimethyl sulfide DMS , a pungent gas that could be detected by albatrosses.
Nevitt and her team placed high-precision GPS loggers on Wandering Albatrosses to precisely map their flight patterns, and they implanted temperature-recording devices in their stomachs to determine when they were feeding.
We now know that albatrosses fly at right angles to the wind direction until they detect DMS and then turn upwind and follow the scent to its source — a plankton community. Sometimes they can find it visually, seeing live or dead birds on the surface. As zooplankton feed on phytoplankton, they literally chew them, breaking cells open, which allows a complex chemical inside to flow into the seawater.
Specialized bacteria in the seawater metabolize this chemical for energy and, in the process, release the byproduct, DMS. Most albatross nests are simple scrapes in the ground or a mud mound. The female lays a single white egg, and both sexes share incubation, which lasts about 60 to 80 days. Both sexes feed the youngster by regurgitating food, and this continues for up to three months in smaller species and up to nine months for the large ones.
So, they nest every other year. When young albatrosses become independent and leave their nest site, they begin a multi-year foray on the open ocean and will not return to land until they are old enough to breed. This process takes about seven years in the Laysan Albatross and other smaller albatrosses and very likely takes longer for the Wandering.
Dying winds are a nemesis for albatrosses. Most of the 15 albatross species occur in the southern oceans, but three species — Laysan, Black-footed, and Short-tailed — occur in the north Pacific.
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