On a pristine Australian island the birds are so full of plastic they crunch
www.abc.net.au
It's an exclusive tourist destination and one of the most pristine places on the planet. It's the last place you would expect to find birds with bellies so full of plastic that they crunch if you squeeze them.

Last month, her team Adrift Lab found a bird that broke the record: almost a fifth of its entire body weight was plastic.

“To witness it first-hand, it is incredibly visceral. There is now so much plastic inside the birds you can feel it on the outside of the animal when it is still alive. As you press on its belly … you hear the pieces grinding against each other."

Since Dr Lavers’s first visit in 2008, she has witnessed an increase from about three quarters of birds carrying about five to 10 pieces of plastic, to every single bird having 50 or more pieces.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    23·
    2 days ago

    Playing Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees while watching montages of birds taking off and landing in slow motion.

    I don’t think “normal” is even real but there’s something that doesn’t feel normal to be like “lol last one left turn out the lights” so often in life. Like… goddamn. We are in an emotional endurance contest with a languid apocalypse. Shit abrades the soul.

    Birds are fucked. Vibes are fucked.

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      20·
      2 days ago

      We are in an emotional endurance contest with a languid apocalypse. Shit abrades the soul.

      The worst part is that in evolutionary terms, everything’s happening at breakneck speed. There hasn’t been a need for life on earth to adapt to changing conditions this quickly since the planet got plastered by a giant space rock. Even then, the dinosaurs to hundreds of thousands of years to finally go extinct. We’ve cut that down to hundreds of years, and that still feels like a time scale that the human brain can’t cope with when it comes to planning and decisionmaking.

      • BountifulEggnog [she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        10·
        2 days ago

        Really? That’s super interesting, I didn’t know that. Going to have to look more at that because most of the information I’ve heard has been focused on the impact itself. (I was not really taught this tbf).

        • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          15·
          2 days ago

          So the initial impact vaporized stuff in the immediate vicinity and blanketed much of the planet in ash, but shit may not have gotten real for the eastern hemisphere until the Deccan Traps kicked off, which researchers now think was a secondary result of the impact. Almost the entire Indian subcontinent got covered in basalt.

          It’s debated what’s fully responsible but the giant volcanic eruption probably didn’t help.

    • GiorgioBoymoder [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      2 days ago

      I hate the way the evil of this world has forced me to change. To cope in daily life there’s an acceptance of the end I’ve had to adopt. My commitment to the truth forces me to face the horror unblinking and in adaptation I harden myself. Ironic detachment works for some but I can’t abide it for me. My love of Earth and the life on it won’t let me. Death is the ruler of our time. We dig death up out of the ground and dole it unsparingly on our brothers and sisters.

      I wonder if there are other worlds like this. Or if this is the only one.

      It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he’d made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and the tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half-crazed and wallowing in the carrion.

      I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there were eight million carcasses for that’s how many hides reached the railhead. Two years ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They’re gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they’d never been at all.

      The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.