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Place 06 · The North Pacific Garbage Patch · Chapter 6 of 7
Plastic on the Menu
On Midway Atoll, albatross parents feed their chicks an estimated five tons of plastic every year, entirely by accident, one lovingly regurgitated meal at a time.
About 15 minutes · 1 video · 1 3D model · 2 quick activities
Start here
Food-sized plastic
On the reef in Place 01 and in the krill chain of Place 05, you followed energy up a food web, one mouthful at a time. In the North Pacific gyre, some of those mouthfuls are plastic. Microplastics are about the size of plankton and fish eggs, floating bags look a lot like jellies, and animals that filter or skim the surface have no way to read the label.
Watch this
See it move
BBC Earth — Albatrosses Swallow Plastic Waste (Hawaii: Message in the Waves). Three minutes with the great ocean wanderers and the plastic they carry home to their chicks. Not easy viewing, but beautifully filmed.
While you watch, look for
- How albatross parents collect food at sea and deliver it to their chicks
- Why a bird that flies thousands of kilometers ends up carrying plastic home
- Something you did not expect. Hold onto it.
The short version
Three things going on here
The small eaters
Plankton-sized plastic
At the base of the food web, zooplankton and small fish feed on things the size of microplastics. When researchers opened 670 small plankton-eating fish from the North Pacific gyre, about a third had plastic in their stomachs, about two pieces each on average. In lab studies, NOAA notes, microplastics can slow the development and reproduction of small animals, and the pieces can carry pollutants stuck to them and chemicals added to the plastic, though how much that matters in the wild is still being worked out.
The big eaters
Albatrosses and turtles
Laysan albatrosses skim the sea surface for squid and fish eggs and scoop up floating plastic too, then feed it to their chicks: an estimated five tons a year on Midway Atoll alone, and one study found plastic in 97.5% of chicks. A 2016 estimate suggested about half of the world’s sea turtles have eaten plastic, and ghost nets entangle turtles, Hawaiian monk seals and coral reefs. Since 1996, NOAA teams have pulled 848 metric tons of lost fishing gear from the reefs of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
The riders
A new floating neighborhood
The sea surface has its own community, the neuston: by-the-wind sailors, blue buttons, violet snails and tiny blue sea dragons, all floating for a living. A 2023 study found them about ten times more concentrated inside the garbage patch than outside it, because the same currents gather them. Another 2023 study found coastal anemones, hydroids and tiny crustaceans, many of them from Japan, living and breeding on floating plastic in the open ocean, where coastal animals were not supposed to survive.
Photos: ArtHouse Studio, Zack Gilbert, Maël BALLAND / Pexels
Play with it
Look a loggerhead in the eye
This is a 3D scan of a real, nearly adult loggerhead sea turtle, photographed by 20 cameras at once before she was released. North Pacific loggerheads hatch on beaches in Japan, and many young ones cross the whole ocean to feed off Mexico, riding the same gyre as the plastic. Spin her and look closely at the head and jaws.
3D model: “Model 47A – Loggerhead Sea Turtle” by DigitalLife3D on Sketchfab (CC BY-NC), captured with the Inwater Research Group.
Two questions to answer while you are in there
- Loggerheads have powerful jaws for crushing crabs and snails, and NOAA says they can mistake plastic bags and fragments for food. What about a piece of floating plastic might look like a meal to a hungry turtle?
- Young loggerheads feed at the surface, often where currents come together. Why is that exactly where they are most likely to meet plastic?
Try it yourself
Check yourself
Try it
The Cast: Who Eats It, Who Rides It
Flip each card to meet an animal of the North Pacific and find out how it meets the plastic.
Try it · interactive
Plastic Food Web
Follow microplastic pieces through a North Pacific food web, from zooplankton to fish, seabirds and turtles; see who eats plastic directly and who gets it through their prey; then visit the rafting community living on the plastic itself.
Open the Plastic Food Web in its own window (opens in a new tab).
Words you will hear
Four terms, that is all
Ingestion
Swallowing something, whether it is food or not
Neuston
Life floating at the sea surface
Rafting
Organisms crossing the ocean on floating objects
Bioaccumulation
Pollutant building up inside one organism
Check your understanding
Practice the whole chapter
Everything in this chapter, in eight quick questions. Retry as often as you like. Read the feedback on every answer, right or wrong, because that is where the learning is.
Practice
Practice: Plastic on the Menu
Eight questions covering the video, the three cards, the four terms and the interactive above.
If you want more
Go deeper
- Oceanography 101 (MiraCosta) 17.9 — Pollution and Pollutants — LibreTexts · 6 minutes
- NOAA Marine Debris Program — Microplastics — NOAA · 5 minutes
- NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries — Laysan Albatross — NOAA · 2 minutes
Photo credits (Pexels): Wallace Silva, Demian Tejeda-Benitez, ArtHouse Studio, Zack Gilbert, Maël BALLAND.
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