Australian scientists have discovered that mutton birds on Lord Howe Island have so much plastic in their stomachs that they clackle and crunch under slight pressure.

Lord Howe, a tiny volcanic island on Australia’s east coast, is home to around 500 humans and over 44,000 shearwaters, aka mutton birds, a species of long-winged seabirds. It’s one of the last places you would expect to be affected by plastic waste, but Australian scientists have made a startling discovery – the birds on Lord Howe Island are so full of plastic that the little stomachs crackle and crunch when pressed. Last month, a team directed a mutton bird and found that almost a fifth of its entire body weight was plastic. Until then, the most plastic they had ever found in one bird was 403 pieces in 2024, but that record was blown away on their most recent visit to the island.

Photo: Neal Haddaway

“I’m sad to say just yesterday we blew [the record] out of the water, and our new record holder is 778 pieces of plastic in an 80-day-old seabird chick, in one of the most pristine corners of our planet,” said Dr Jen Lavers, who has been studying the birds of Lord Howe Island for 18 years.

“To witness it first-hand, it is incredibly visceral,” Lavers added. “There is now so much plastic inside the birds that 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.”

The scientists are trying to raise awareness about the danger that plastic poses not only to the birds of Lord Howe Island but to all like on this planet, but they are not exaggerating in the slightest. To prove that you can actually hear the plastic inside shearwaters, they recorded the sounds the stomach of one such bird makes when pressed.

 

“These birds have a very important story to tell, and what they are telling us is that their populations are in decline, that the amount of plastic they’re consuming is going up and up,” Dr. Lavers warned.