Although they have many valuable uses, single-use plastic products are used by humans. This implies serious environmental, social, economic and health consequences. One of them is the alteration of marine environments and their inhabitants, from mammals to microorganisms.
In Patagonia, scientists Marina Winter, Sergio Abate, and others Colleagues from the National University of Río Negro, carried out an analysis between 2020 and 2022 on 23 individuals that represented 5 birds and 2 mammals.
They found a 10-centimeter piece of macroplastic in a specimen of the large Macá bird. The animal had swallowed a yellow elastic band that humans use on packaging.
Penguins become bioindicators of water pollution by plastics
According to Winter, in dialogue with BLACK RIVER, “the elastic band that was on the bird kept its color and rigidity intact.” It is inferred that the bird had ingested the band a short time before dying.
The bird may have mistaken the rubber band for a fish, which is one of its main food sources, according to Winter. The Macá found was on La Lobería beach within the Punta Bermeja nature reserve, Río Negro.
The research was published in Marine Pollution Bulletin. This magazine also disseminated another finding made from Argentina by CONICET researchers at the Argentine Institute of Oceanography (IADO, CONICET-UNS), located in Bahía Blanca, Buenos Aires province.
Together with colleagues from the “Pedro J. Aymonino” Center for Inorganic Chemistry (CEQUINOR, CONICET-UNLP-associated with CICPBA), they found the first evidence of contamination by microplastics in Magellanic penguins, which had been stranded on the Atlantic coast of southern the province of Buenos Aires.
This species of penguins migrates from the south to Brazil. Along the way, many get sick and arrive on the beaches in a serious state of health or dead.
The scientists took that situation into account. They took specimens of penguins that died during their rehabilitation following being stranded on the coast. They analyzed his digestive tract and found traces of ingestion of plastics and plastic particles, as detailed by Tatiana Recabarren Villalón, a Conicet doctoral fellow at the and first author of the work.
They studied the entire digestive tract of the penguins, separating all organic matter and classifying by size, type and color all evidence of the presence of microplastics.
Through different techniques, the exact determination of the chemical composition of the samples was possible: the polymeric material of plastic origin might be discerned.
According to experts, In all the penguins studied, microparticles represented 91 percent of the debris found, 97 percent of which were fibers of anthropic origin, that is, from human activity..
In the same sense, more than 62% of the total particles were of plastic origin, with polypropylene and polyester being the most abundant. Semi-synthetic cellulosic fibers, metallic particles and pigments used in the textile and plastic industries were also found.
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