A study published by the well-known international journal “Nature Communications” on the 1st found that blue whales eat as many as 10 million plastic particles every day, equivalent to 43.6 kilograms. This suggests that ubiquitous plastic pollution is doing more harm than ever to the largest animal on Earth.
Microplastics are plastic fragments less than 5 mm in diameter or length, produced through the disposal and decomposition of various consumable products and industrial waste. Tiny pieces of plastic can be found everywhere from the deepest parts of the ocean to the highest points of mountains, and even in human organs and blood.
A modelling study published in the prestigious international journal Nature Communications estimated how much microplastics whales ingest each day, according to AFP and Archyde.com. A U.S.-led team of researchers implanted tags on 191 blue, fin and humpback whales off the coast of California to observe their movements.
“It’s basically like an Apple Watch on a whale’s back,” said lead author Shirel Kahane-Rapport, a researcher at California State University, Fullerton. “Most of these whales forage in waters at depths of 50 to 250 meters, the “water column where the highest concentration of microplastics occurs.”
The researchers estimated the size and amount of food the whales ingested and filtered out each day, simulating three different scenarios. In the most likely scenario, blue whales will eat as many as 10 million microplastics a day, equivalent to 43.6 kilograms. In a foraging season of 90 to 120 days per year, this equates to the ingestion of more than 1 billion microplastics per year. Humpback and fin whales are estimated to ingest between four and six million microplastics a day.
It’s easy to imagine that whales inhale large amounts of plastic particles as they swim in the ocean, but researchers have found that’s not the case. In fact, 99 percent of the microplastics in whales are already present in the organisms they prey on.
“It’s important to us,” Kahani-Laporte said, because humans also eat those catches. “We also eat anchovies and sardines” and “krill are the foundation of the food web”. Previous research has shown that if krill were placed in a tank with microplastics, “they would eat that.”
Concentrations of microplastics have been increasing in the oceans for decades, and it is unclear what potential effects ingesting microplastics might have on whale health.
(Editor-in-Chief: Zhuang Yanyu)