20th September, 2021

2305ENV seeks to equip students, not only with the information and drive to take on today’s greatest environmental challenges, but also practical and analytical skills desirable across many sectors of environmental science.

Each year our students undertake a guided sea-bird dissection for the purpose of quantifying plastic ingestion. Data from shearwaters that have died along the southeast QLD coastline, contributes to a long term monitoring study of stomach plastic content in these species. Shearwaters are highly migratory, moving annually between the Arctic and the Southern Ocean. The energetic budgets of these species are therefore highly sensitive to the ingestion of nutritionally redundant particles, such as macro- and micro- plastic debris.