Less plastics found in stomachs of fulmars

Plastic marine litter, both industrial granules and consumer wastes is declining slowly but with certainty. For some years, this tendency was already present. Now, the addition of the data of monitoring year 2015 to the time series of plastic ingestion by Northern Fulmars has shown a statistically significant trend.
Currently, still 93% of beached fulmars has plastic in the stomach, on average 23 particles with a mass of 0.29 gram of plastic per bird. About 53% of the birds had more than 0.1 gram of plastic in the stomach, whereas North Sea countries have agreed to a policy target in which no more than 10% of the fulmars may exceed that threshold (News Item WUR, 24 November 2016).
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