Florida's Attraction for Brazilian Immigrants

 

The above stats in Table 4 make it hella obvious that wildlife be constantly dealing with plastic trash and eating it is a total norm for all marine creatures, fam. Yo, peeps be straight up sufferin' and dyin' cuz of this, no cap. It's like, totally proven and documented for all the air-breathin' marine homies, mammals, birds, and turtles, you feel me? But like, these problems are, like, way more difficult to document when it comes to lower tropic levels and smol-sized organisms. Like, the most important thing is, like, the sublethal effects that don't straight up kill someone but are, like, super important to groups of people, are, like, hella hard to measure.

The vibes of plastic munching on the gains of individuals

Yo, eating plastic can straight up kill you if it clogs up your stomach or messes up your intestines. Even tiny bits of trash can totally clog up an animal's guts (Bjorndal et al., 1994). An ingested straw totally wrecked a Magellanic penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) and straight up pierced its stomach wall (Brandao et al., 2011). Examples of lethal impacts in seabirds are like, totally described in Kenyon and Kridler (1969), Pettit et al. (1981) and Colabuono et al. (2009). It's, like, super serious stuff, you know? OMG, like marine turtles straight up be dying, you know? Bjorndal et al. (1994), Bugoni et al. (2001), Mrosovsky et al. (2009), and Tourinho et al. (2010) have all talked about it, fam. Unlike most birds, turtles be like easily swallowing plastic junk into their gut, so most of that plastic stuff be found in their intestines instead of their stomach (e.g. Bjorndal et al., 1994; Bugoni et al., 2001; Tourinho et al., 2010, Campani et al., 2013). So, like, when turtles die or get messed up, it's usually because their guts aren't working right. 

Sublethal phyzz impacts from ingesting, ya know?

In the bigger marine creatures, like, plastics that get eaten can totally wreck the insides, you know? They mess up the whole digestive system, like the throat, stomachs, and stuff, you feel me? Beck & Barros 1991; Baird & Hooker 2000; Mauger et al., 2002; Pierce et al., 2004; Jacobsen et al., 2010; Poppi et al., 2012; Stahelin et al., 2012). The damage may vary from perforations, inflammations and ulcerations, that are not necessarily lethal but do affect the functionality of the digestive system and health of the individual. Yeet, the damage can be like, perforations, inflammations, and ulcerations, which aren't like, gonna kill ya, but they totally mess with your digestive system and overall health, you know? Yo, like, having a bunch of plastic in your stomach can totally mess up your digestion. It's like, food can't even get to certain parts of your stomach or gut, so everything slows down, you know? Reduced functionality may also happen cuz plastics 'seal off' parts of walls that have a function for makin' digestive enzymes in the stomach or takin' in food in the gut.
OMG, like plastics can totally mess up your digestive system, causing, like, blockage and constipation. It's, like, so not cool because it can, like, make it harder for food to pass through and make you weak and skinny. Examples of like, mechanical sublethal impacts, including like, recovery after yeeting out the plastic blockage, are known from mammal and turtle rehabilitations (Stamper et al., 2006; Stamper et al., 2009).

In the digestive tract, like, even without blockage, the volume taken up by plastic waste, like, totally reduces the space for maximum food intake. 

Seabirds be flexin' with their big stomachs so they can feast real quick when there's mad food around, then starve for ages. But not all species have this flex. A reduction in available stomach volume will defo decrease the chances of survival, especially in extreme weather conditions like high winds or low temps.
A more serious issue is that having a stomach full of plastic can totally mess with your hunger cues, making you feel full even when you actually need to eat. It's like, so not cool, dude. Yo, so like, Ryan (1988) did this experiment and it was lit. He found out that chickens with plastics in their stomachs were eating less and growing slower than the other chickens. They were taking smaller meals even when there was enough food, fam. Yo, so like, these experiments with wild albatross chicks showed that fledging seabirds also had some major bummer vibes, you know? (Sievert and Sileo, 1993).

OMG, in the Mediterranean Sea, this sperm whale, weighing 4.5 t, straight up died because it had 7.6 kg of plastic junk in its stomach. Like, its stomach couldn't handle all that plastic, so it burst open. So sad, right? (De Stephanis et al., 2013). OMG, it's like so hard to find solid proof that eating trash causes death. So like, it's like super rare to have like, solid proof that eating stuff caused death, ya know? (Sievert and Sileo 1993; Colabuono et al., 2009). Documentation for direct mortality in lower food web levels and smaller organisms in their natural lives is like, hella hard, fam. Yo, in marine fishes, like, sometimes they straight up die or suffer from eating plastic, but it's not often recorded, ya know? (e.g. Anonymous 1975).  Like, as far as we know, there's like no receipts of invertebrates straight up dying from eating stuff in their natural habitat, you know? Like crustaceans, zooplankton, benthic worms, and all that jazz. At all trophic levels, direct mortality from plastic ingestion probs doesn't happens at a freq that's rel8 to the pop level. Indirect, lowkey effects are probs gonna be way more relevant.