What Happens to Birds when They Eat Plastic
- Posted by: Zach Frechette
- on October 20, 2009 at 12:33 pm
We’ve featured Chris Jordan’s work before, but this is too compelling not to share. A little while ago, he took a trip to the North Pacific gyre to see what all the fuss was about. From the project description:
These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
It almost looks like these birds exploded from all the plastic inside them. View all the images at his website.
DISCUSSION: 7 Comments
While Chris Jordan’s giant photos of tossed cellpones or soda bottles are pretty cool, I think I like these more (if “like” is the word) because they’re totally unmanipulated.
Addendum: These birds will eat anything and it’s killing them. This is pretty sad.
Devil’s advocate: If an animal will eat anything, even things that kill it, isn’t that just natural selection at work?
You could call it natural selection if you want, and fault the birds for failing to quickly adapt to an environment that is, all of a sudden, filled with plastic crap. But just because it’s “natural” in this ridiculously broad sense, that doesn’t mean it’s ok. By that standard catastrophic climate change and AIDS and asbestos are all just selection pressures, but we still want to do something about them, right?
i rarely comment but im really enjoying this debate.
Oh
Morgan Clendaniel wrote: “Devil’s advocate: If an animal will eat anything, even things that kill it, isn’t that just natural selection at work?” Yeah, but that makes it sound like humans know what they are doing when they, say, create an incredible waste stream from throw-away plastic containers that are polluting and destroying the planet. Birds eating plastic was not what we intended but rather a consequence of our thoughtless actions (believing that the planet’s resources are infinite and that we can just keep trashing and wasting everything). And as it turns out, we are intimately connected to many other species, so to have us just assuming that each species we wipe out won’t affect us is displaying incredible ignorance and self-centeredness … not to mention we’ll eventually wipe ourselves out if we keep up this “natural selection” process. And though the birds that eat plastic may not have the self-awareness to realize their own mortality let alone that of their species, we humans do have this capability and hence must confront the fact that our actions cause unintended consequences that eventually come back to bite us in the butt.