A nutritional perspective on plastic ingestion in wildlife

Although the perils of plastics to living organisms including humans have been neglected for decades, they have recently been recognized as amajor environmental problem worldwide. Little progress has beenmade on understanding the factors that drive species' and populations' susceptibilities to the ingestion of plastic. Here, we propose using nutritional ecology as a multidisciplinary framework for bridging the gaps that link nutrition, behavior, plastics, physiology and ecology. We show that nutritional niches are tightly linked to plastic ingestion, illustrating the application of our framework in the context of nutritional niche theory, habitat-specific foraging from species to populations, and transfer patterns in food webs. (c) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.