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Some Asian elephants are a little shy about their eating habits. They sneak into landfills near human settlements on the edges of forest habitats and quickly devour the garbage – plastic containers, packaging and everything. But their guilty pleasures for fast food travel with them – elephants haul plastic and other human trash deep into forests in parts of India.
“When they defecate, the plastic comes out of the manure and accumulates in the forest,” said Gitanjali Katlam, an ecological researcher in India.
Although much research has been done on the spread of plastics from human pollution to the world’s oceans and seasMuch less is known about how such waste moves with wildlife on land. However, elephants are important seed dispersers and Research published this month in the Journal for Nature Conservation shows that the same process that processes ecosystems can transport man-made pollutants to national parks and other wilderness areas. This plastic can have adverse effects on the health of elephants and other species that consume the material after it has passed through the digestive systems of large mammals.
Dr. Katlam first noticed elephants feeding litter on trail cameras during her PhD. Working at Jawaharlal Nehru University, she was studying which animals visit the dumps on the edge of villages in North India. At the time, he and his colleagues also noticed that elephants have plastic in their excrement. With Natural Science InitiativeA non-profit organization focused on ecological research in northern India, Dr. Katlam and colleagues collected elephant dung in the state of Uttarakhand.
The researchers found plastic in all the manure near village dumps and in the forest near the town of Kotdwar. Dr. They only walked a mile or two into the forest in search of dung, but the elephants probably carried the plastic much farther, Katlam said. Asian elephants take about 50 hours to eat and can walk six miles to 12 miles a day. In the case of Kotdwar, this is about the town being just a few miles from a national park.
“This adds to the evidence for the fact that plastic pollution is ubiquitous,” said Agustina Malizia, an independent researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council who was not involved in this research but who reviewed this research. effects of plastic on terrestrial ecosystems. He says the study is “extremely necessary,” as it may be one of the first reports of a very large land animal ingesting plastic.
Plastic made up 85 percent of the waste found in elephant dung from Kotdwar. Much of this came from food containers and cutlery, followed by plastic bags and packaging. But the researchers also found glass, rubber, fabric and other waste. Dr. Katlam said he was looking for pots and plastic bags, as the elephants likely still have leftover food inside. The utensils were probably eaten in the process.
Elephants may be ingesting chemicals such as polystyrene, polyethylene, bisphenol A, and phthalates as the litter passes through their digestive systems. It’s unclear what kind of damage these substances can cause, but Dr. Katlam is concerned that they may contribute to a decline in elephant population numbers and survival rates.
In Argentina, Dr. Working with Malizia and Dr. “It’s known from other animals that their stomachs can fill with plastic and cause mechanical damage,” said Carolina Monmany Garzia, who was not involved in Katlam’s study.
Other animals can re-consume the plastic when it is transported into the forest via elephant dung. Dr. “There’s the step effect,” Katlam said.
Dr. Katlam said governments in India should take steps to manage their solid waste to avoid such problems. But individuals can also help by separating food waste from containers so that too much of the plastic is accidentally eaten.
“This is a very simple step, but a very important one,” he said.
Dr. “We need to understand and understand how the overuse of plastics affects the environment and the organisms that live in it,” Mealizia said.
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