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Ocean Watch
By Susan Scott
Monday, June 12, 2000
IN my house I have a wall covered with hundreds of beat-up, plastic cigarette lighters. Albatrosses feed
lighters to offspringIt's a small wall, a partition really, but there is no bare space left on it. It is packed with lighters of every color, stuck on with super glue. This wall often embarrasses people visiting for the first time because they don't know what to make of this odd decoration.
"Lighters?" they say, blinking at the wall. "How, um, ah ... how colorful."
I don't make anyone suffer long because I like to tell the story of my lighters. After that, people look at my wall in a whole new light.
If you haven't guessed the secret of the lighters yet, here's a hint: I did not collect them from the beach but they are firmly linked to marine animals.
Hint No. 2: I recently met a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ranger, Jennifer, who also collects lighters. She hangs them from pieces of driftwood with fishing line and calls the creation Regurgi-Chimes. Got it? OK.
EACH lighter on my wall (and in Jennifer's chimes) has been inside the stomachs of two albatrosses, first a parent, then its chick.
That's because Laysan albatross parents, thinking the lighters were food, picked them off the surface of the ocean, flew them back to the nesting grounds and fed them to their hungry offspring. Some chicks die from their cigarette lighter (and other plastic) meals. You can often see the sad evidence of this after a body has decomposed. In the former nest lay a circle of white bones surrounded by a pile of plastic, almost always including a lighter.
Fortunately, many chicks throw up their lighters. Vomiting lighters sounds gross, but it isn't. In fact, it's good to see these birds naturally rejecting these bizarre items from their bodies. The chicks stand up and start heaving just like we do when we're sick. Then plop, out comes a lighter.
Recently at Midway, I saw a bird eject two lighters at once. Usually accompanying the lighters are dozens of indigestible squid beaks, a good sign since squid is normal food for albatrosses.
ONCE, right before my feet, a chick chucked up a piece of curved plastic about the size of a business card. Stuck to it was a mass of flying fish eggs, another common albatross food. My friend separated the plastic from the eggs and laid them on the grass in front of the chick. To our astonishment, it gobbled the eggs right up.
The number of cigarette lighters in Hawaii's albatross nesting grounds is staggering. In places where they have not been picked up, the ground is bright with these colorful plastic butane containers. Even in places where workers are constantly cleaning up, like Midway, it's common to find lighters on the ground.
Lighters, presumably discarded from fishing boats, are only the tip of the marine debris iceberg. Derelict fishing gear, such as nets, hooks and line also do tremendous harm to marine wildlife. To examine this problem and ways to prevent it, the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and its multi-agency partners are holding an international conference on marine debris this summer. From Aug. 6 through 11, concerned people from all over the Pacific will meet at the Hawaii Convention Center. For information about this conference, call 808-875-2317 or email info@mauipacific.org.
My lighter wall means something different to each person who sees it and nearly always elicits interesting comments and discussions.
For a living room conversation piece, I couldn't do better.
Marine science writer Susan Scott's Ocean Watch column
appears Mondays in the Star-Bulletin. Contact her at honu@aloha.net.
