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. The frequency of occurrence (FO) of plastic in Arctic fulmars was 62 % (100 % in Nova Scotia), and mean mass of ingested plastic was 0.027 g, with just two birds from the Arctic (3.4 %) exceeding 0.1 g while all the birds from Sable Island (n = 3) exceeded 0.1 g. This FO was lower than data from previous collections in the Arctic and North Atlantic. Additional monitoring is required to determine whether this reduced FO represents a single year anomaly, or the start of a declining trend.
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Plastic ingestion by northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) in the Canadian Arctic and Northwest Atlantic.
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Department of Biology, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia B4P 2R6, Canada.
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Institut des Sciences de la Mer, Université du Québec à Rimouski, Rimouski, Québec G5L 3A1, Canada. Electronic address:
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