What are you looking at in that picture? You're looking at the remains of a baby albatross, which starved because it was fed plastic which its parents had picked up from the ocean thinking it was food. From the site:
These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.Pathetic. We are starving these birds through our own actions, and we'll wind up being the poorer for it. If things like this don't make you think long and hard about how we treat this planet ... I don't know what's wrong with you.
h/t: bioephemera
ETA: CBC News article on an upcoming manuscript documenting this tragedy.
ETA: A Scientific American article on the story. This one comes complete with a video of albatross chick necroscopies. And this article does (weakly) pay homage to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic poem.
Posts
