Blue whales could be eating 10 million pieces of plastic every day

The person is Madeleine Cuff.

Blue whales could be accidentally eating 10 million pieces of microplastic every day according to new research.

Blue whales use bristly baleen plates to sieve or trap small fish from the ocean.

Matthew Savoca and his colleagues have been looking into the issue of whales and microplastics.

The researchers combined feeding data from almost 200 tagged blue, fin and humpback whales with data on whale prey and plastic concentrations to model how much plastic whales could be consuming.

The highest concentrations of microplastics can be found at depths of 50 to 250 metres.

Humpback whales could eat up to 4 million plastic particles a day, while blue whales could eat up to 10 million.

Savoca says that these numbers are the largest estimated daily ingestion of any species to date. The animals themselves are huge, so we need to consider their enormous size to start to tease apart the potential effects of this huge amount of plastic inside a huge body.

Savoca says that little is known about how plastic can affect the health of whales.

Nature Communications was published in the journal.