Plastic waste forms huge, deadly masses in camel guts
Clumps made up of plastic bags and other trash in the animals’ stomachs are called polybezoars
![dromedary camels eating trash](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/120820_aj_plastic-eating-camels_feat.jpg?fit=1030%2C580&ssl=1)
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.
Ulrich Wernery
By 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 Monica, Calif.
“We hear about marine mammals, sea lions, whales, turtles and seabirds impacted” by plastic waste, Eriksen says (SN: 6/6/19). But “this is not just an ocean issue. It’s a land issue, too. It’s everywhere.”
About 390,000 dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) live in the United Arab Emirates. Now in a study in the February 2021 Journal of Arid Environments, Eriksen, Wernery and colleagues estimate that plastic kills around 1 percent of these culturally important animals.
Of 30,000 dead camels that Wernery, a veterinary microbiologist at the Central Veterinary Research Laboratory in Dubai, and his team have examined since 2008, 300 had guts packed with plastic. In a subset of five camels, the plastic weighed from three to 64 kilograms. The researchers dubbed these plastic masses “polybezoars” to distinguish them from naturally occurring hair and plant fiber bezoars.
![polybezoars from dead camels](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/120820_aj_plastic-eating-camels_inline_680_desktop.png?resize=680%2C450&ssl=1)
![polybezoars from dead camels](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/120820_aj_plastic-eating-camels_inline_680_mobile.png?resize=680%2C450&ssl=1)
As dromedaries roam the desert looking for food, they munch on plastic bags and other trash that drift into trees and pile up along roadsides. “From the camel’s perspective … if it’s not sand, it’s food,” Eriksen says.
With a stomach full of plastic, camels don’t eat because they don’t feel hungry, and they starve to death. Plastic can also leach toxins and introduce bacteria that poison the one-humped mammals, Wernery says.