Deleterious Effects of Litter on Marine Life

By S. Kühn, E. Rebolledo, J. V. van Franeker. 2015

772 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this review we report new findings concerning interaction between marine debris and wildlife. Deleterious effects and consequences of entanglement, consumption and smothering are highlighted and discussed. The number of species known to have been affected by either entanglement or ingestion of plastic debris has doubled since 1997, from 267 to 557 species among all groups of wildlife. For marine turtles the number of affected species increased from 86 to 100 % (now 7 of 7 species), for marine mammals from 43 to 66 % (now 81 of 123 species) and for seabirds from 44 to 50 % of species (now 203 of 406 species). Strong increases in records were also listed for fish and invertebrates, groups that were previously not considered in detail. In future records of interactions between marine debris and wildlife we recommend to focus on standardized data on frequency of occurrence and quantities of debris ingested. In combination with dedicated impact studies in the wild or experiments, this will allow more detailed assessments of the deleterious effects of marine debris on individuals and populations.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb022ef4503e997276120d93c6312b8fc819cad8

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

In Pollution

Citations in the corpus

Marine litter as habitat and dispersal vector (2015, background): “Additionally, ingested litter can damage or block intestines, thereby affecting nutrition with often lethal effects (reviewed by Derraik 2002; Kühn et al. 2015).”
A Review of Plastic-Associated Pressures: Cetaceans of the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Australian Shearwaters as Case Studies (2018, background): “Uptake of microplastics has been demonstrated in zooplankton species such as copepods and euphasiids (Kühn et al., 2015; Fossi et al., 2018b), which are some of the main prey of baleen whales and may thus be a source of secondary transfer of debris to cetaceans.”
Happy Feet in a Hostile World? The Future of Penguins Depends on Proactive Management of Current and Expected Threats (2019, background): “In four of the five species, ≤2% of individuals had ingested plastic (Kühn et al., 2015).”
Observations of floating anthropogenic litter in the Barents Sea and Fram Strait, Arctic (2016, background): “Most obviously, it causes entanglement and suffocation and interferes with food uptake and digestion of 580 marine species (Kühn et al. 2015).”
Microplastics in the Marine Environment: Distribution, Interactions and Effects (2015, background): “Although all species of marine turtle ingest macroplastics (Derraik 2002; Schuyler et al. 2014; Kühn et al. 2015), only one study reported plastic pellets in the stomachs of the herbivorous green turtles (Chelonia mydas) (Tourinho et al. 2010).”
Investigating microplastic trophic transfer in marine top predators. (2018, background): “For example, twelve of 32 seal species have been documented to ingest marine debris (Kuhn et al., 2015; Ryan et al., 2016) and Hoarau et al.”
Marine Ecosystem Assessment for the Southern Ocean: Birds and Marine Mammals in a Changing Climate (2020, background): “In the Southern Ocean, plastic entanglement has been reported in at least 18 flying seabird (Kühn et al., 2015; Ryan, 2018) and seven penguin species (Ropert-Coudert et al.”
The quest for seafloor macrolitter: a critical review of background knowledge, current methods and future prospects (2020, background): “consequences for reproduction and survival (Kühn et al., 2015).”
All is not lost: deriving a top-down mass budget of plastic at sea (2017, background): “…to the heterogeneity of plastics and the wide variety of associated chemical contaminants, the (toxic) effect mechanisms are manifold, causing widely differing responses in individuals and species with different biological traits (Diepens et al 2015, Rico and van den Brink 2015, Kühn et al 2015).”