On Remote Indian/Pacific Islands, Plastic Trash Killing At Least 500,000 Hermit Crabs Every Year
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“These results are shocking but perhaps not surprising, because beaches and the vegetation that fringes them are frequented by a wide range of wildlife,” lead author Jennifer Lavers, a marine eco-toxicologist at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, said in a news release about the study. “It is inevitable that these creatures will interact with and be affected by plastic pollution, although ours is one of the first studies to provide quantitative data on such impacts.”
Map shows the study sites (blue circles) and sampling regions (red). Left: Cocos (Keeling) Islands (North Keeling Island is not shown on inset map); right: Henderson Island. Click here to enlarge. Image courtesy of Lavers et. al., 2019 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
The research team surveyed beaches on Henderson Island and the Cocos Islands in 2017 and 2019. Researchers counted plastic containers that could potentially cause entrapment because they had an opening and were positioned at an angle that would prevent crabs that entered from escaping, as well as both living and dead hermit crabs inside them. The researchers then used the survey data to predict total entrapment rates across the islands.
On Henderson Island there were approximately 38 million pieces of trash trapping and killing an estimated 61,000 crabs each year. On the Cocos Islands there were 414 million pieces of trash entrapping 508,000 crabs each year. That worked out to 239 pieces of trash per square meter on the beaches of Henderson Island, and 713 on the Cocos Islands.
Hermit crabs are lured into plastic debris by the smell of decaying crabs in order to replace their own shells, an instinct that compounds the crabs’ demise. In one particularly lethal container on Henderson, the team found 526 trapped hermit crabs.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2020/02/plastic-trash-kills-half-a-million-hermit-crabs-on-remote-islands-each-year/
= new reply since forum marked as read
simply sad. 
