Plastic ingestion by juvenile green turtles (Chelonia mydas) off the coast of Southern Brazil

Identifying Potential High-Risk Zones for Land-Derived Plastic Litter to Marine Megafauna and Key Habitats within the North Atlantic

“…Plastic ingestion in turtles has been documented in many studies, with all species now documented to ingest plastic (Kühn et al, 2015;Nelms et al, 2015). Much of that comprises single-use plastics, such as fragments of packaging and plastic bags/ wrappers (Choi et al, 2021;Petry et al, 2021;Santos et al, 2015). In the Gulf of Mexico, 65 % of the 189 green turtles (Chelonia mydas) necropsied in 2019 contained plastic in their gastrointestinal tracts (Choi et al, 2021), whilst 91 % of the turtles necropsied in the Pacific had ingested plastic (Clukey et al, 2017).…”

“…In the North Atlantic, the plastic debris may be entangled with the Sargassum-dominated macroalgal mats, which provide an important habitat for oceanic-stage neonatal turtles (Eastman et al, 2020). Petry et al (2021) found that 88 % of juvenile green turtles had ingested plastics, with an average of 38 pieces per individual, whilst Eastman et al (2020) found that 92 % of post-hatchling loggerhead turtles stranded in the Gulf of Florida had ingested plastic, with an average of 49 pieces per individual. In South Africa 24 of 40 stranded post-hatchling loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) had ingested plastic, with this being the cause of death for 11 of these, and contributing to the death of another five (Ryan et al, 2016).…”