2011
276 pieces
64.10 g
Lord Howe Island · sable shearwater
How much plastic can fit inside a seabird?
How many pieces of plastic were found inside one young seabird?
Make a guess before you see the answer.
894
894 pieces
A field representing 900 positions, with 894 filled. Each filled position represents one piece of plastic recovered from the bird.
One sable shearwater fledgling
Lord Howe Island, 2025
894 pieces
64.21 g of plastic
Extreme individual, not the average bird.
The highest count in a 16-year watch of sable shearwaters on Lord Howe Island, Australia, was 894 plastic pieces in one fledgling in 2025. The plastic weighed 64.21 grams. The study is in Earth’s Future. The pieces counted were larger than about 1 millimetre.
What would that mean for a person?
By body-weight proportion alone, that is roughly equivalent to an 80 kg person carrying about 12 kg of plastic.
64.21 g in this bird
about
12 kg in an 80 kg human
A scale comparison only. It does not say that a bird and a person would suffer the same medical effects.
Was this a freak one-off?
The 2011 record stood for more than a decade. Then the yearly maximum rose in 2023, again in 2024, and leapt in 2025.
2023
403 pieces
52.53 g
2024
407 pieces
26.30 g
2025
894 pieces
64.21 g
highest count
2026
644 pieces
67.4 g
highest mass
2025 holds the highest number of pieces.
2026 holds the highest mass in the Earth’s Future series, with fewer pieces.
The 2026 pairing of 644 pieces and 67.4 grams is from that paper. The museum note does not publish it.
Researchers once treated counts around the earlier records as close to what a fledgling stomach could physically hold. Later birds went past that supposed limit.
A stable share, a growing extreme
Across 2010–2026, the share of sampled fledglings that contained any plastic stayed high, typically 75–85%. That rate did not climb in a simple line. What changed is the load in the worst-affected birds: more pieces, and in 2026 more mass, than anyone in the study had recorded before.
Share of chicks with plastic
75–85%
broadly steady for 16 years
Worst individual count
276 → 894
the far tail moved
A figure such as “what percentage of birds contain plastic?” can stay fairly stable while the amount swallowed by the worst-affected individuals gets dramatically larger. The authors looked at those extreme exposures on purpose. 894 is the top of a distribution, not a portrait of every chick on the island.
How does a chick end up with 894 pieces?
The parents forage in the Tasman Sea and regurgitate food at the burrow. They mistake floating plastic for prey. The chick does not hunt. It sits and is fed, for roughly three months, until it has to fly.
How we know
Adrift Lab has sampled sable shearwater fledglings on Lord Howe Island from 2010 through 2026. The birds are caught near fledging. Plastic is recovered from the proventriculus by stomach flushing, then washed, dried, counted and weighed. Items in this count are larger than about 1 millimetre. They are plastic pieces, not a tally of invisible particles. In the most packed birds, flushing cannot always empty the stomach. Some extreme loads were finished after the bird had died, when the rest of the plastic was taken out by hand.
16 years, lavage, pieces larger than 1 mm
The 894-piece bird is one individual from that series. Mean loads are much lower. Count and mass are separate measurements: 2024’s maximum held more pieces than 2023’s and weighed less; 2026’s maximum held fewer pieces than 2025’s and weighed more.
What this plastic does
Plastic takes up space that would otherwise hold food. In this species it is also linked with scarring of the stomach lining, described as plasticosis, and with protein signatures of organ failure and neurodegeneration in highly exposed chicks a few months old. A 2026 mark-recapture study found that fledglings with more than 1 gram of plastic were less likely to return and breed; birds with more than 5 grams were almost never seen again. Those findings describe this population at loads far smaller than 64 grams.
Sources
Empirical claims on this page trace to the 2026 Earth’s Future paper and to the museum note that published the body-weight comparison. Earlier records and health findings sit in the papers below.
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1. Abrupt Recent Increases in Plastic Ingestion by Sable Shearwaters (Ardenna carneipes)
The 2010–2026 series, 75–85% prevalence, the abrupt rise in quantity after 2022, bottle caps and nurdles.
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2. Record-breaking levels of plastic found in seabirds, with almost 900 pieces found in one bird alone
894 pieces, 64.2 g, more than 15% of expected body weight, the 12 kg in 80 kg analogy, the 2011 record.
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3. Is It Getting Worse? Fifteen Years of Data Say Yes, But Not How You’d Think
276 pieces in 2011 as a supposed limit, the 2023 and 2024 records, 894 in 2025, unchanged prevalence.
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4. Plastic ingestion by Flesh-footed Shearwaters (Puffinus carneipes): Implications for chick body condition and the accumulation of plastic-derived chemicals
The April 2011 bird: 276 pieces, 64.10 g, 14.4% of that chick's actual body mass.
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5. Ingested plastics reduce recruitment and survival of an Australian seabird
More than 1 g of plastic is associated with a lower chance of returning to breed; above 5 g the birds are almost never seen again.
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6. Seabirds in crisis: Plastic ingestion induces proteomic signatures of multiorgan failure and neurodegeneration
Proteomic signatures of organ dysfunction and neurodegeneration in highly exposed chicks; 403 pieces removed from one 90-day-old chick.