A team of researchers from Australia, the U.S., Indonesia and New Zealand found that whale sharks off the coast of Indonesia were consuming an average 137 pieces of plastic per hour.
By using nets fine enough to collect both plankton and very tiny bits of plastic to mimic the way mantas and whale sharks feed, they were able to calculate how much each was consuming over a given time period.
In addition to the more obvious issues associated with the ingestion of foreign, potentially indigestible objects – such as digestive tract obstruction and perforation, dietary dilution and starvation – plastics, are significant carriers of toxic additives. In these plastic pollution hotspots, filter feeders would be at an elevated risk of ingesting microplastics and tainted zooplankton, and would be exposed to plastic associated pollutants.
“Communicating this information to communities who stand to benefit from healthy megafauna populations might help local governments as they work toward reducing plastics in the marine environment,” said lead author Elitza Germanov of Murdoch University.
The results were published in the latest issue of Frontiers in Marine Science.
