How oil spills in the ocean can affect birds on land:
We often watch on social media and news about oil spills in the oceans. What comes to mind after looking at such information?
Mostly we think yeah, it's bad and move forward doing our own thing.
Little do we realize the dangers of oil spills for the environment, land as well as the little creatures called birds that do so much good to our ecosystem and planet earth.
Oil spills do a lot more damage to the birds than we thought. Effects of oil spills on birds:
Birds feathers make them waterproof and the oil breaks their proofing system and causes them to be exposed to freezing temperatures which results in the bird's body losing heat fast and having a condition called hypothermia.
Any bird that ingested oil can have breathing problems, and affect its ability to fly.
Oil can fail their natural resiliency and weightlessness. If they lose their buoyancy they drown and the ocean becomes their own grave.
Any oil spilled area can no longer be a home to any bird as it becomes full of poison and toxins. Thus, making it uninhabitable for the birds.
Oiled areas have toxins in them so the food these little birds take becomes poisonous for them and they get malnutrition & eventually die.
These little creatures matter!
Many pieces of research have shown that even limited exposure means hard to fly and many other dangers that cost the lives of these tiny creatures. Biologists from the US experimented on home pigeons to test the impact of birds to fly when they are oil spilled. “Lightly oiled” pigeons took longer to return than the birds that had no oil on their feathers.
The results are published in the journal Environmental Pollution.
It's high time that we humans realize the dangers lurking and causing damage.
Can we have a healthy future without having healthy oceans? NEVER!
Our oceans cover 70% of the world's surface. The world economic forum is collaborating with the World Resources Institute to take out solutions to protect the seas.
Prevention and Restoration is the solution. The latter is time-consuming and costly.
We hope all these measures ensure that ecosystems are protected!
