Wasting the Environment

"It was also aluminum, drywall, wax paper. I have photos and you can actually read the cheese wrapper I found in the bird, and glass that you could read. Just big chunks, really."
"There were a lot of big things. I found rope. I found a piece of plastic knife. There's a lot of stuff in there for sure. They're [gulls at landfills] not selective."
"It's a small fragment [the photographs] of what the birds were actually eating."
Sahar Seif, Carleton University undergraduate student

In a newly published paper, Carleton University researcher Sahar Seif found gulls were gulping down everything from drywall to pointy bits of metal.  (Michael Probst/AP Photo)

Goats are known for their apparent lack of discrimination, in their proclivity to eat just about anything they come across. Presumably, their constitution as mammals is as iron-clad as that of gulls in the avian kingdom. And it was gulls in particular that Sahar Seif, an environmental biologist, and lead author of a paper recently published in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, was primarily interested in studying.

Seagulls fly over garbage being dumped at a landfill site in Tokyo Bay in this April 18, 2000, file photo.

TSUGUFUMI MATSUMOTO/AP

Landfill sites attract the presence of gulls in huge, swooping populations picking among the garbage to feast on what to other species of birds and mammals would surely represent indigestible, unpalatable and nutritionless waste. Their presence is so ubiquitous at waste sites all over the world that the contents of their stomachs are often examined as a monitoring device to estimate the amount of plastic in the environment.
  Three gull species were examined by Ms. Seif and her co-authors, common to a landfill in St. John's Newfoundland. Plastic in excess was discovered through necropsies of 41 birds. Plastic foam appears to have been particularly attractive to the gulls, its presence accounting for over one-quarter of all the garbage discovered in stomach contents of the birds. Bits of metal and glass comprised another 20 percent of stomach contents, while building materials represented over five percent.

A fast-food plastic snack bag 13 centimetres from top to bottom was also discovered. Yet as Ms. Seif pointed out, gulls are capable of regurgitating any items happening to upset their stomachs, making it obvious that what the research team chronicled in contents might have been a mere snapshot of total contents. The researchers also discovered that the gulls did not appear to be physically suffering from their intake of garbage.

Trash found in the stomach of a gull that had been feeding at a landfill in Canada.

Sahar Seif

They could detect no links between the human detritus discovered in the stomachs of these birds and the appearance of ulcers or lesions in their stomach linings. "They are very tough in that regard", observed Ms. Seif. Who also pointed out that gulls evolved as functional scavengers who in any environment, including wilderness settings, are capable of expelling potentially dangerous tidbits like sharp bone fragments.

But while it seems likely that gulls can scavenge debris without obvious harm resulting, the same may not be true for other seabirds who are in all likelihood also taking in similar castoffs and since they don't have the same evolutionary protection, they do come to harm. Ms. Seif's acute observation should give second pause to society as a whole, in this regard; that every bit of the detritus that the researchers discovered present in the gulls was designed for a single use then discarded.