The Brazilian Immigrant Boom in Florida

 

Ayo, a big question is whether wildlife munchin' on trash be messin' them up or, like, causin' 'harm'. Yo, animals be gobbling up all sorts of trash like paper and wood and stuff, but like, synthetic materials are, like, totally the most reported, you know? The whole plastic eating thing, whether on purpose, by accident, or just because, has been totally seen in lots of different animals.Since the first major review by Laist (1997), the number of animal species known to chow down on plastics has like totally blown up, from 177 to 331 species. The recent review by Kühn et al. (2015) spills the tea that like, at least 40% of the world’s seabird species (164 out of 406 species), 100% of turtle species (7 out of 7), and 50% of mammals (62 out of 123), are currently known to have chowed down on plastic marine debris. 

Chowing down

Like, that's seriously not cool, fam. Yo, there's been mad gains in species records for fishes (92 species) and invertebrates (6 species), but it's prolly 'cause there's been a ton more studies, not 'cause they suddenly started eating more. OMG, like, there's more and more proof that animals are eating plastic. It's cray cray! Shellfish like mussels and oysters, worms, shrimps, and tiny sea creatures are all chowing down on plastic (Van Cauwenberghe et al., 2012, 2014; Leslie et al., 2013; Devriese et al., 2015). The Kühn et al. (2015) review only talks about animals eating stuff in the wild, and doesn't include any experimental eating records.The ratio of species gobbling up plastics varies depending on the squad. Yo, when it comes to seabirds, the tubenoses (Procellariiformes: albatrosses, shearwaters, petrels, storm- and diving-petrels) are like the top dogs when it comes to eating plastics. Like, 60% (84 out of 141) of the species have been recorded chowing down on plastic. 

Next up we got the Charadriiformes, fam, they be including

wow, like, waders, skuas, gulls, terns and auks are all flexin' out there, but get this, a whole 40% (55 of 139) of those species are known to have chowed down on plastics. like, that's wild! Yo, the detectability of plastic chowin' down kinda depends on what kinda tummy a species or squad has, ya know? Like, check it out, most tubenosed seabirds are all about keeping debris in their stomachs to grind it up and then pass it through their intestines, ya know? But like, most Charadriiformes bird species are always like, regurgitating bolls of like, super hard to digest stuff from their diet, you know?

Our knowledge on scale and extent of plastic chomping by marine creatures decreases kinda with the size of animals and like, with the size of the plastic bits. OMG, like plastic has been found in benthic worms (Van Cauwenberghe et al., 2012), shrimps (Devriese et al., 2015), and shellfish (De Witte et al., 2014) in the wild. It's cray cray! Elsewhere plastics have been recorded in like, same species, but also in smol zooplankton (Desforges et al., 2015) and goose-barnacles (Goldstein and Goodwin, 2013). OMG, in this lit review about turtles eating plastic, Schuyler et al. (2013) found that like 15% to almost 50% of the turtles they studied had debris in their bellies. So cray! Smol, oceanic-stage turtles were more likely to chomp on debris than coastal foragers, while carnivorous species were less likely to munch on debris than herbivores or gelatinovores. Leatherback turtles be chowin' down on jellyfish and other squishy creatures, so they're like super vulnerable to all the bad stuff from eatin' plastic bags and junk.

There's, like, a bunch of stuff out there about fish and invertebrates eating things (Kühn et al., 2015).

 

Like, check it, Boerger et al. (2010), Davison and Asch (2011) and Van Noord (2012) straight up proved that lantern fish (Myctophidae) in the Pacific be gobbling up plastics all the time. Davison and Asch totally proved that like 9.2% of Myctophids in the North Pacific gyre area had plastic in their stomach. It's wild! In da Euro region, like 10 fish species from da Channel area, Lusher et al. (2013) found dat 36.5% of dem had plastic, including some super tiny fibers. Yo, in the North Sea, Foekema et al. (2013) found that like only 2.6% of peeps had plastic bits in their stomachs, but they didn't even look at fibers, smh. OMG they like totally found more pieces in the gross Channel area, with like up to 33.5% of cod being affected. So not cool! Romeo et al. (2015) just spilled the tea that like 18% of those big fishies in the Mediterranean (tuna, albacore, swordfish) had plastic trash in their stomachs. OMG, so like, in this pilot study, they checked out the stomachs and intestines of 258 pelagic and 132 demersal fishes from the North and Baltic Sea to see if there were any microplastics. How wild is that? 69% of the fish samples were microplastics lit, nine polymer types (PE, PP, PS, PET, PVC, PA, PC, PUR, PMMA) were detected, representing more than 80% plastic types flexed (Scholz-Böttcher et al., in publication).