URIs_MOMENTUM_Research_and_Innovation_Magazine_Spring_2021_M

ANNA RUTH ROBUCK URI Researcher U.S. EPA Postdoctoral Fellow

“Some of the birds gathered from the breeding colony were chock-full of plastics to the point that their digestive tract organs were bursting. And that’s why they died.”

- Anna Robuck

Photo by Jason Jaacks

Anna Robuck’s plastics research started by accident at the University of Rhode Island’s (URI) Graduate School of Oceanography, where she earned her doctorate in December 2020. As an environmental chemist, she received a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scholarship at the outset of her doctoral program to look for chemical pollutants in seabirds. But she was astonished at the amount of plastics she found at the same time and began collecting information. “As I started studying the birds to carry out the chemical analysis, every bird had plastics in their stomach,” Robuck recalled. “Some of the birds gathered from the breeding colony were chock-full of plastics to the point that their digestive tract organs were bursting. And that’s why they died.” The portion of the shearwater’s stomach where plastic gets stuck is only about the size of a U.S. half dollar. With an average of 8-11 pieces of plastic in a young bird’s stomach, there’s little room left for food and digestion. The largest number of plastic pieces found in a single bird was an astonishing 202.

HOW MUCH PLASTICS ARE SEABIRDS EATING,

and what are the Impacts?

written by DIANE M. STERRETT

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