Leatherback sea turtles are critically threatened by plastic ingestion because their anatomy makes them particularly vulnerable to mistaking plastic bags for their jellyfish prey.
Plastic ingestion causes a particularly distressing death for leatherback turtles. The backward-facing esophageal spines that evolved to grip slippery jellyfish also trap plastic items that cannot be expelled. As plastic accumulates, digestion is impaired, the intestine may perforate, and the turtle develops a false sense of fullness that causes it to stop eating. Death by starvation follows over weeks or months. The inability to regurgitate plastic means that a single ingestion event sets off a chain of harms that cannot be reversed without veterinary intervention. Rehabilitating plastic-impacted turtles is possible but resource-intensive. Prevention through plastic waste reduction is the only scalable solution. Leatherback turtles that die at sea from plastic ingestion are rarely recovered, meaning the scale of this welfare problem is substantially underestimated.