How plastic 'jelly fish' and 'squid' are killing marine animals

Hundreds of plastic wastes floats mercilessly around the Indian Ocean beach waters along Lamu Island seafront in Lamu County on Saturday,011th May,2019.Locals who dispose such wastes to the water may not understand the danger the waste pollution posing danger to marine life especially the endangered sea turtles.[FILE,Standard]

Plastic waste is so ubiquitous; animals are eating it.

The evidence is on every dumpsite, garbage collection point, and trucks carrying garbage. It is simply the most abundant household garbage.

A 2024/2025 study in Lamu, Kenya, found microplastics in 100 per cent of donkey (and cattle) faecal samples. Literally every animal had plastic inside them. 

The study, by University of Portsmouth, in collaboration with animal welfare organisation Donkey Sanctuary, the Flipflopi Project and Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI), registered donkey fatalities caused by plastic-induced colic. Donkey Sanctuary runs a veterinary clinic – which was part of the study – in Lamu. The clinic attended to 91 donkeys that had colic, of which 16 died.

According to Dr Obadiah Sing’oei, the Programme Manager at the clinic, it is a wake-up call for collective action to end the “plastic crisis in Lamu”.

He states in the in-house publication: “This study provides hard evidence of the true scale of the problem and its widespread impact.”

Ingested plastic more often than not cause death: directly or indirectly.

In March 2024, a lactating cow in rural Murang’a became sickly overnight. The owner of the animal had it slaughtered before it could die.

“We found a tuft of nylon rope inside its stomach,” Christopher Ngugi, the owner, told The Standard. While investigations indicated that the animal was dying from anthrax prior to slaughter, Ngugi believes the plastic tuft contributed to the animal’s death in one way or another.

“A big chunk of plastic waste finds its way into the ocean; either through rivers or blown by the wind,” says Griffins Ochieng, an environmentalist and Executive Director of Centre for Environmental Justice and Development (CEJAD).

In February 2018, a juvenile sperm whale washed up dead off the coast of Murcia, Spain.

El Valle Wildlife, a local wildlife recovery center, conducted a postmortem on the carcass: discovering 29kg of rubbish – most of which were plastics such as shopping bags, fishing nets and a jerry cans – in its digestive tract.

According to Dr. Jacqueline Uku, a senior research scientist at KMFRI, to marine animals, plastic tends to resemble their food.

“They mistake plastic for food. Those that eat jellyfish may think that the plastic is a jellyfish. Those that eat squid would mistake plastic bags for it. The plastic then clogs their digestive system, causing death in many cases,” she says.

Mid September, last year, this journalist visited Kuruwitu Community Based Organisation in Kilifi; a beach management unit (BMU) created under the 2016 Fisheries Management and Development Act.

“One of our activities is to collect plastic waste – every day – because they harm fish, corrals and other wildlife,” says Charo Kabwere, a member of the BMU who is also a fisherman.

The group have put up a steel caricature in the shape of fish and stuffed it with plastic collected from the beach: a poignant metaphor on how plastic is affecting ocean wildlife.

The steel fish, they hope, speaks to the hearts and minds of every visitor; communicating to them not to liter – especially with plastics.

“I think humans have put a lot of plastics into the marine environment that is just impossible to clear,” Kabwere says.

Joey Ngunu, a marine biologist, knows only too well how marine animals ingest plastics. Ngunu leads a team at Watamu Turtle Watch, along the Kenyan coast, in rescue, treatment and rehabilitation of turtles.

He says: “Plastics, in the marine environment, resemble jelly fish: an essential food for turtles. Therefore, turtles are highly susceptible to eating plastic. Once ingested plastic ‘create air’ in the stomach and hampers the turtle’s ability to dive and look for food. It is called floaters syndrome. Approximately 42 out of about 800 turtles (in distress) that we attend to have the syndrome,”

Ngunu says turtles are an indicator species: they show us the health of the ocean.

“If their population drops it is indicative of something wrong.”

So far, the evidence they’ve collected indicates that the ocean is accumulating volumes of plastic that is not healthy for marine ecosystem.

Ngunu and team are also worried about fibropapillomatosis – a debilitating condition where wart-like growths develop on turtle’s skin, eyes, and organs.

“The condition is linked to pollution, especially synthetic chemicals used to manufacture plastics,” Ngunu says.

Athman Anwar is a fisherman from Mombasa Old Town. He says the amount of plastic in the ocean is humongous.

“Out in the ocean we encounter plastics of all manner and kind,” he says. “The ocean is like the ultimate waste reservoir: everyday plastic is spewing into it.”

Big fishes, such as tuna, swordfish, sting rays and shark, he says, often eat plastic waste – mistaking them for food. Anwar blames sheer human stupidity for the plastic waste menace along the coast.

“How else can you explain someone throwing garbage out through the window? We are just horribly behaved with regards to handling waste.

“Plastics are slowly and surely contributing to declining fish catches. Every now and then we encounter marine animals that have died after consuming plastics.

“Usually, they bloat and die. These fishes starve and die because plastic is indigestible and does not give way to food they need.

“As fishermen, sometimes we conduct beach clean-ups. But within a month the waste will be back like before. It is almost a useless exercise,” he says.

A new study, published on November 17, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sought to establish the amount of ingested plastic that could be lethal to species.

The researchers looked through records for ingestion of macroplastics (pieces that are visible to the naked eye) from at least 10,000 marine animal autopsies. According to the researchers, plastics of that size can block or slice the animal’s internal tissues and organs; or cause torsion in its digestive tract.

From their analyses, a small seabird – such as an Atlantic puffin – has a 90 per cent chance of death after eating just three sugar cubes’ worth of plastic.

For a loggerhead sea turtle – found along the Kenyan coast – plastic equal to about two baseballs would most likely seal its fate. For sperm whales, it is 28 tennis balls.

The United Nations Ocean Conference estimates that 100,000 marine mammals, at least one million sea birds, and countless fish, die every year due to plastic pollution.

The final dataset in the plastic ingestion study included all sea turtle species, 57 seabird species and 31 mammal species. Another way plastic pollution effects ocean mammals is through entanglement, says Ngunu.

“Most entanglements happen because of abandoned or discarded fishing gear. The nets cause horrible injuries to the animals – in most cases killing them if the animal is not rescued,” he says.

Have you eaten anything from the supermarket today? Chances are it was wrapped in plastic.

According to UNEP, an equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic enter the world’s oceans, rivers, and lakes every single day. On a small section of Kuruwitu beach, measuring approximately one-meter squared, this journalist was able to pick and count over 70 pieces of plastics the size of plastic bottle tops – or bigger, wider, longer.

Why should you care?

The growing plastic problem along the coast has led to tens of start-ups – like Dr Tayba Hatimy’s Baus Taka – providing solutions ranging from upcycling to recycling.

The start-up has developed an app that offers incentives to families to entice them into proper waste segregation – primarily aggregation and proper disposal of plastics for recycling.

A dentist by training, Tayba says: “Household plastic waste eventually finds its way into the ocean. In the ocean plastic affects both food security and food safety.”

All plastics, in the environment, she says ‘decompose’ by breaking down into small, then smaller, then tiny, and finally microscopic particles that are now found everywhere on earth.

“Those teeny-tiny plastics are what every human being should be worried most about.”