Plastic ‘fossils’ to help scientists reconstruct the history of bird nests

One man’s trash is common to Coot -the treasure, at least when it comes to plastic.

In Amsterdam, the birds were Making nests of plastic food wrappersmasks and other waste for at least 30 years, reporters reported in February Ecology. Revelation shows not only how many plastic litters now environment, but also the power to use products that are made by a man to learn about the natural world.

“It is ironic to think that many of these plastic objects used for a few minutes for one-time use of people, but these Coots have been used for decades,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist from the Naturalis Biolable Center in Leiden, the Netherlands.

Hiemstra has been studying nesting materials for years that the city of birds use. Documented Coots Adding face masks to their nests During the peak pandemia of the Coid-19-Civil Material, they still use wrap and other birds and found rebellious magpi and crows that built their homes outside the antibird of spikes. Many birds use human garbage these days as a nesting material, says Hiemstra.

2021. Hiemstra and colleagues dug the usual Coot (Futica Attra) A nest built on a wooden beam that exited from Rokin Channel in Amsterdam. The nest had more layers of plastic waste, especially food packages. Analyzing the dates of the Coots collection, Hiemstra used plastic in the way the archeologist would use fossils, to build the history of the nest layer according to the layer.

Coots usually build their nests from plant materials that fall quickly, so that birds cannot re -use nests from year to year. However, with the installation of plastic, the nests become much more stable, so that Coots can return to the old nests and upgrade to their solid foundations.

In total, the Hiemstra team found 15 nests that had plagued in many years, indicating that the birds used them again.

Using the expiration date for understanding the history of nests can be imprecise. Because plastic lasts so long, old pieces can be found in recent nest layers. For example, Hiemstra found a bag of chips peppers from the 1970s brand toward the top of a nest. But when the packages with similar expiration are collected, Hiemstra says, it creates a belief that that part of the nest is constructed about that time.

In the deepest part of the nest Rokin, he found several sheaths dating in the early 1990s, including the Mars Bar, promoting the 1994 FIFA World Cup.

“Weird, the wrapper is in a pristine state, as if it’s full of yesterday,” Hiemstra says. “You still know he’s 30 years old. It really shows that plastic is here to stay.”