Wednesday, 16 December, 2020 - 13:15
Two dromedary camels forage on trash that litters the desert surrounding Dubai. A new study suggests that plastic kills 1 percent of camels in the United Arab Emirates. | Photo: ULRICH WERNERY Dubai- Asher Jones
Marcus Eriksen was studying plastic pollution in the Arabian Gulf when he met camel expert Ulrich Wernery. “[Ulrich] said, ‘You want to see plastic? Come with me.’ So we went deep into the desert,” Eriksen recalls. Before long, they spotted a camel skeleton and began to dig through sand and bones.
“We unearthed this mass of plastic, and I was just appalled. I couldn’t believe that almost did not believe that a mass as big as a medium-sized suitcase, all plastic bags, could be inside the rib cage of this [camel] carcass,” says Eriksen, an environmental scientist at the 5 Gyres Institute, a plastic pollution research and education organization in Santa Mon
Camels are munching on plastic, and the results are deadly
Dec. 16, 2020 , 10:45 AM
Plastic pollution is a well-known problem for marine animals, which can mistake floating trash as food. But they aren’t the only ones; some camels do it, too,
Science News reports. This ingested plastic accumulates in their stomachs, forming masses that can weigh as much as 64 kilograms. These gut-clogging clumps dubbed polybezoars kill about 1% of dromedary camels (
Camelus dromedarius) in the United Arab Emirates, researchers estimate in the February 2021 issue of the
Journal of Arid Environments. Polybezoars can block intestines and leak toxins, or simply give camels a false sense of fullness, so they stop eating and slowly starve to death.