In April, Lavers and her team broke a disturbing record: 778 pieces of plastic were found inside a single 80-day-old chick. “I’m sad to say just yesterday we blew [the record] out of the water,” she said. “In one of the most pristine corners of our planet.”

That plastic load made up nearly a fifth of the chick’s body weight.

Earth is cooked.

EDIT: Fuck, the video is hard to watch. But you should. Everybody should. The sound is awful. Sorry for the Instagram link, but as best as I can tell, it's the original source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ3fhlVTy1O/

Entire article is just a repost of the original from ABC news, with less information. I recommend the original:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-15/birds-crunch-full-plastic-losing-war-waste/105221266

Limits to growth called this. Chapter 4. Pollution ends up becoming the limiting factor far sooner than any other constraint in most of their model runs.

https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth/page/n129/mode/2up

My dogs would love one of these!

No, but seriously, this sucks.

This is one of the most depressing stories I read about the state of our planet in a while, especially because this is happening in a remote place.

If anyone needs an uplifting story you could visit https://theoceancleanup.com/, they've been doing great work and doing more and more every year. Also if you have some left over money please check it out.

Macro plastics 😞

Who knew beanie babies were a prophetic warning

I’ve never been anyplace where you can just touch a wild bird, let alone determine they make a crunching sound when touched!