The Guts of Seabirds are being destroyed by plastics
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How Plastic is the Plastic Thick Button? Chemical Enrichment of a Particle by Breaking it into Microfiber, Spherule, and Shard
You might ask, “So what?”, it is just plastic. After all, if you accidentally swallow a shirt button, it’ll pass straight through you, right? But when it’s broken down into microscopic fibers, spherules, and shards, it behaves very differently. These particles release toxins, including carcinogens. Their rough surfaces snag other toxins and microbes, transporting them to new environments and into bodies. Microplastics can cause effects that can cascade up the food chain, as small creatures like plankton and insects mistake them for food, so they get less nutrition, grow less, reproduce less and sicken more easily. Microplastics are shown to affect the expression of genes in animals. Plastic microfibers can cause harm like that of asbestos by getting deep into the lungs.
In other words, a shift in the microbiome appears to favor potentially harmful, pathogenic microbes. Significantly, it happened in seabirds that had been eating environmentally relevant amounts of microplastics. (In previous laboratory studies, scientists have exposed various species to unrealistically high concentrations of microplastic.)
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