Marine Debris Project Final Report 2014

3.2 DEWHA to coordinate marine debris abatement strategies identified in existing marine wildlife recoveryplans. For example: • DEWHA to support analysis of the impact of marine debris on the survival andbehaviour of marine turtles (linked with DEWHA 1–2 years)There are two relevant research projects involving CSIRO, one in collaboration with the University ofQueensland investigating ingestion of plastics by marine turtles and a second in collaboration withGhostnets Australia investigating entanglement in drifting gear.The ingestion work has identified types of plastics ingested, evaluated the role of selection by turtles iningestion, and identified characteristics of debris which lead to higher ingestion rates (Schuyler et al. 2012,Schuyler et al. 2013, Schuyler et al. 2014). Based on that work ingestion rates by turtles are relatively high,and increasing over time (Schuyler et al. 2013). Turtles are selective of materials, and tend to prefer itemsthat are flexible, and different in colour from the background debris in the ocean. These results suggestthat changing the design of consumer items, which constitute the largest portion of debris, might reducethe ingestion rates of turtles. Recent results on entanglement include a rough estimate of the catch rates ofturtles by Ghostnets drifting ashore in northern Australia. The preliminary estimate for the number ofturtles captured by these nets is between approximately 5,000 and 15,000 turtles (Wilcox et al. 2014).There are plans to refine this estimate over the next six months to increase the accuracy of the estimate.Hardesty et al. (2014) | 67