As an added note on Richard's thoroughly pessimistic (and realistic)
post:

> entire surface of the world's oceans are covered with this stuff all just
> awaiting for something to come along and mistakenly eat it thinking it was a
> jellyfish or copepod or something. Stomachs of turtles become impacted, the
> animal dies. Those excreted are just recycled back around again awaiting the
> next unsuspecting victim. Quite literally, on this grand scale, a solution
> *is* hopeless. We've all done screwed up already and it's irreversible. The
> best we can do now is to just not make it worse and continue cleaning up as
> best we can.
>

When you do work on Midway Island you feel like you are in the middle
of the absolute furthest "corner" of the ocean from anywhere, but the
plastic problem there is equally dramatic and depressing. The adult
Laysan albatrosses pick food from the surface to bring back to the
chicks, usually floating masses of squid eggs. The chicks get a lot
of surprisingly large pieces of plastic out of this. Most of them
seem to do o.k., and if they survive to fledge (and then survive the
sharks), they reach a point where they can apparently regurgitate the
plastic bits. But many chicks never make it that far-- the present
theory as I understand it is that the plastic displaces too much food
capacity for the chick to gain enough strength to survive. When that
happens the carcass rots in place, leaving a pile of plastic in the
middle of the pile of bones. I have some amazing pictures of this,
many of the carcasses have plastic combs, hairbrushes, lots and lots
of bic lighters, ball point pens, cellophane tape rolls, caps from
detergent bottles, toothbrushes, and of course a lot of those squid
like lures that they use for fishing with long lines-- they get it all. Its not just a
handful, either. An albatross chick can down several good solid
piles of this crud before it dies. At least, we found that the
dead adults we cut open were pretty clear of plastic inside-- I guess
they barf it up when they grow up.
Clarice Clark
jbroadus at seanet.com
Puyallup, WA. 98371