What goes up must go down?

What goes up must come down, and sometimes this has deadly consequences for seabirds. We’ve just published the results of a study linking ingested marine debris with cause of death in seabirds, finding that a bird can die after just ingesting a single piece of plastic marine debris. Of the types of debris we found, balloons were disproportionately deadly to seabirds compared to hard plastic. In 1 out of every 5 birds found to have eaten a balloon, that balloon was its cause of death.