Albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters are among the most severely affected seabirds by plastic pollution, with ingested plastic causing malnutrition, gut injury, and chick mortality across populations.
Plastic ingestion causes welfare harm through multiple pathways: gut blockage that prevents natural food passage, false satiety that reduces hunting behavior while the bird starves, and toxic chemical exposure from pollutant-laden plastic. Chicks fed plastic by parents that cannot distinguish it from prey die of starvation despite receiving apparent feeding attention. The welfare scale is enormous — millions of individual seabirds across hundreds of species. Consumer actions that reduce single-use plastic entering ocean systems, combined with fishing gear modification to reduce abandoned plastic, address the root cause of this welfare crisis.