Publications by authors named "Kristine E Hanifen"
Plastic pollution is omnipresent in the marine environment, including much of the Arctic. Northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) are particularly vulnerable to ingesting plastics floating on the water's surface, and are an international biomonitor of this contaminant. We sampled plastic ≥1 mm in size from the stomachs of fulmars collected by Inuit hunters in Arctic Canada, as well as beached fulmars from Sable Island, Nova Scotia.
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- Seabirds are increasingly ingesting plastic, affecting various species differently based on their ecological and morphological traits.
- In Canada, a study on northern fulmars, black-legged kittiwakes, thick-billed murres, and black guillemots revealed that 51% of fulmars contained plastic, while kittiwakes and murres had much lower rates, and guillemots showed no significant ingestion.
- The data suggests that while fulmars ingest less plastic than those in the European Arctic, they still serve as an effective indicator for monitoring plastic pollution in Canada compared to other local species.
Seabirds ingest contaminants linked to their prey's tissues, but also adsorbed to ingested plastic debris. To explore relationships between ingested plastics and trace elements concentrations, we analyzed 25 essential non-essential trace elements in liver tissue in relation to plastic content in the gastrointestinal tract in adults of four species of Arctic seabirds with different propensity to ingest plastic. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) provided a clear separation between species based on element concentrations, but not among individuals with and without plastics.
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