Plastic pollution and discarded fishing gear cause extensive welfare harm to seabirds globally, through ingestion, entanglement, and nest contamination. Understanding the scale and solutions informs effective action.
Marine debris impacts on seabirds illustrate how industrial and consumer choices cascade into suffering for individual wild animals far removed from the point of plastic production or disposal. A seabird chick fed regurgitated plastic by a parent cannot understand why it cannot satisfy its hunger; a gannet entangled in discarded netting suffers a prolonged death from strangulation or drowning. These individual welfare harms are multiplied across millions of animals. The welfare case for plastic reduction and fishing gear management is as compelling as the conservation case - both ultimately point in the same direction.