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This story was originally appeared Atlas Obscura and Climate Table collaboration.
The latex glove was striped, dirty, yellow-gray, the color of a plastic bag that unfolded in a tree and tangled in the branches. When Dutch citizen scientists saw that they were collecting rubbish in the Oude Vest canal in Leiden in August 2020, they saw something worrying. He tore off his glove, and tucked his wedge under his thick finger, they saw his tail. He was a frail and rather rough man, and he belonged to a creature who had never swum and found his way.
This unfortunate fish – European perch, Perca fluviatilis– is among the many animals found recently in pity for the pandemic-related dumping wave. Humans have been living with Covid-19 for over a year – and that means other animals as well. For months scientists suspect that masks, plastic gloves, and personal protective equipment (PPE) that people have lost or thrown away in parks, water, and other public spaces are caused by animals. Now, researchers have gathered observations from various countries to see how creatures cope with our condemnations.
The Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environment based in Washington, DC, regularly organizes International Coastal Cleanup, a blitz of garbage collection events around the world. Last July, the organization added “PPE” as a category of trash that participants could have enter an application. The Ocean Conservancy continued with a survey in early 2021 and 94% of respondents found it he had seen PPE contamination at cleaning events the previous year. (In total, volunteers carried nearly 107,220 pieces of PPE — mostly masks and gloves — across 70 countries.) Most trash was found in sand, grass, or sidewalks, but more than a third of participants found EPE in oceans or elsewhere. Just over half of respondents reported seeing EPE fragments in their communities on a daily basis.
As the PPE was a newly introduced category, there is no perfect way to assess whether these numbers compare to the findings of previous years. But the authors of the report suggest that this type of trash would capture accounts in other categories, such as “Personal Hygiene” or “Other Trash”. (This is also the umbrella he covered until mid-2020.) According to the PPE, the personal hygiene waste was three times higher than in the period measured in 2020, compared to the same period in the last three years.
As ecosystems around the world are more flooded with PPE than ever before, other researchers are continuing to see how animals react to it. A last job Animal Biology, The Royal Dutch Zoological Society magazine provides a photograph.
For this study, a team of Dutch scientists, led by biologists Auke-Florian Hiemstra and Liselotte Rambonnet of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Institute of Biology at the University of Leis, have crawled Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with tagged images and messages. A combination of some words like “garbage”, “Covid”, “face mask”, “PPE”, “tangled”, “catch”, “bird’s nest” and so on. On paper, 28 observations were identified, many of which were reported by rescue centers or veterinarians. The team also maintains a website which invites anyone from all over the world to report observations of animals introduced or swallowed in EPEs.
The team found animals associated with our pandemic garbage in a variety of ways. The birds put the litter in their nests: the rocks of the Netherlands had a traditional mask and a latex glove, a product that also included the excavation of some sparrows from Warsaw (Poland). More worryingly, other animals mixed detritus with dinner. In September, a Magellanic penguin in Brazil was found to have eaten a face mask. The following month, someone in Malaysia described him chewing a long-tailed macaque. Yet other creatures were trapped. A Dutch bat and a hedgehog were found mixed in masks. In February, someone reported one gathered around a seagull sardine. In March, someone in the Philippines saw a face covering drown the coral.
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