Albatross Chicks Full of Plastic: The Story of Midway Atoll

The photograph below shows what is left of a young seabird after its body has decayed: a ring of feathers around a pile of bottle caps, lighter parts and plastic fragments that the chick swallowed and could not digest. Images like this come from Midway Atoll in the North Pacific, one of the most remote places on Earth and home to the largest colony of Laysan albatrosses in the world. They became some of the best-known pictures of ocean plastic pollution because they show, very plainly, that rubbish thrown away thousands of kilometres off still ends up inside wild animals.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

The short film that once accompanied this post is no longer online. What follows explains the place and the birds behind images like this one, and what the evidence says.

Midway Atoll: remote, but not empty

Midway lies roughly halfway between North America and Asia, about 2,110 km (1,310 miles) north-west of Honolulu. It is an unincorporated United States territory at the far end of the Hawaiian chain and sits inside the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, one of the largest protected marine areas in the world, first designated in 2006.

The atoll is often described as uninhabited, but that is not quite right. Around 40 to 50 people live on Sand Island, all of them U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff and contractors who run the wildlife refuge. There is no permanent civilian population and visits are limited to work and volunteer trips. That is exactly what makes the plastic so striking: almost none of it comes from the people living there.

Why albatross chicks swallow plastic

About 1.5 million Laysan albatrosses gather on Midway to breed each winter, roughly two-thirds or more of the species’ world population. Each pair raises a single chick. While the chick waits on land, the parents fly long distances over the ocean to feed, skimming food from the surface.

Floating plastic is easily mistaken for food when it bobs among the prey the birds are looking for. The adults bring back what they have caught and regurgitate it into the chick’s mouth, passing plastic along with real food. Young chicks cannot bring up indigestible material until they are about four months old, so fragments build up in their stomachs.

According to the summary of research on the atoll, nearly all Laysan albatrosses examined there have plastic in their digestive systems, and about one-third of the chicks die. A stomach packed with plastic leaves less room for food and water, which is why the problem is so visible in the remains of chicks that did not survive.

How much rubbish reaches the atoll

Ocean currents carry floating rubbish across the North Pacific, and Midway lies in their path. Around 20 tonnes of debris wash up on the atoll’s beaches every year, and roughly 90 percent of it is plastic. Albatrosses are not the only victims: sea turtles and endangered Hawaiian monk seals also swallow debris or become tangled in it.

What washes ashore is a mix of fishing gear, bottle caps, lighters, toys, toothbrushes and countless broken fragments whose origin can no longer be traced. Much of it is the ordinary disposable plastic found in any kitchen or bathroom.

The photographs that made Midway famous

American artist Chris Jordan began publishing photographs of dead albatross chicks on Midway in 2009 under the title “Midway: Message from the Gyre”. He later turned the project into a feature documentary, Albatross, which was released as a free public artwork in 2018, timed for World Oceans Day.

The Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, an international treaty body whose list includes the Laysan albatross (classed as globally Near Threatened), has highlighted the film’s scenes of adults feeding plastic to their young. Photographs in the same style as the one on this page have circulated widely since; the image here has the hallmarks of that Midway work, though its exact photographer could not be confirmed.

What actually helps

Use less disposable plastic. Bottle caps, lighters, cutlery and packaging are among the items most often found in seabirds. Refillable bottles, lighters you keep and loose produce cut that stream at the source.
Keep litter out of drains and rivers. Plastic dropped on a street, beach or riverbank can travel to the sea on wind and rain; it does not need to be thrown from a boat.
Support clean-ups and refuge work. Volunteer beach clean-ups and the staff on Midway remove tonnes of debris before it can be eaten.
Back better rules. Deposit-return schemes, limits on single-use items and better handling of lost fishing gear tackle the problem at a scale no single person can.

The lesson of Midway is that distance offers no protection. An island with almost no people still receives a steady cargo of plastic from the rest of the world, and its birds carry it in their stomachs.

Sources: Midway Atoll (Wikipedia); ACAP: Chris Jordan’s ALBATROSS offered as a free public artwork.

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