Ocean plastic kills sea creatures. It can obstruct, perforate or twist their airways and gastrointestinal tracts.

Now new research shows it takes just 6 pieces of ingested rubber the size of a pencil eraser to kill most sea birds.

For marine mammals, 29 pieces of any kind of plastic — hard, soft, rubber or fishing equipment — is often lethal.

It’s the first time researchers have quantified how much and what kind of plastic — soft, hard, rubber or fishing debris — is needed to kill a bird, marine mammal or a turtle.

“Seeing the particularly small thresholds for rubber and seabirds, for example, that just six pieces of rubber, each smaller on average than the size of a pea was enough to kill 90% of sea birds that ingested it. … That was particularly surprising to me,” said Erin Murphy, a researcher with the group Ocean Conservancy and the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Toronto.

The sea birds were less sensitive to hard plastic: It would take 25 pieces of the pea-sized hard plastic pieces to ensure a 90% chance of dying.

Murphy and her colleagues from the University of Tasmania, in Australia, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, also from Australia, and the Federal University of Alagoas, in Brazil, published their study Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

For decades, researchers have been documenting death by plastic in marine animals. They have reported it in the gastrointestinal tracts of nearly 1,300 marine species — including every species of sea turtle, and in every family of seabird and marine mammal.

The team analyzed data from 10,412 published necropsies, or animal autopsy reports. Of the animals studied, 1,306 were sea turtles, representing all seven species of the animal; 1,537 were seabirds representing 57 species; and 7,569 were marine mammals across 31 species.

They found that 35% of the dead seabirds, 12% of marine mammals and 47% of sea turtles examined had ingested plastic. Seabirds seemed to be particularly sensitive to rubber. For marine mammals, soft plastics — such as plastic bags — and fishing debris was most harmful. For sea turtles, it was hard and soft plastics that were the most lethal.

“This was severe trauma or damage to the GI tract, or blockage of the stomach or intestines from plastic … and so these were physical harms that you could see, that you could see in the gut of these animals, and that were reported by scientists,” Murphy said in describing the reports.

The paper did not look at other ways plastic can kill marine animals — strangulation, entanglement and drowning.

Nor did it look at malnutrition or toxicity caused by eating plastic.

“So, this is likely an underestimate of the impacts of ingestion, and it’s definitely an underestimate of the lethality of plastics more broadly,” Murphy said.

Nearly half the animals in their analysis were threatened or endangered species.

More than 12 million tons of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, according to several environmental and industry reports. That’s a garbage truck’s worth dumped every minute.

According to the United Nations, that number is expected to triple in the next 20 years.

“I find this piece a brilliant contribution to the field,” said Greg Merrill, a researcher with the Duke University Marine Lab, who did not participate in the study.

“We have thousands of examples of marine animals ingesting plastic debris. But for a number of reasons, eg. lack of data, difficulty of conducting laboratory-based experiments, and ethical considerations, risk assessments are really challenging to conduct,” he said in an email.

Such assessments are crucial for linking plastic ingestion to mortality, because “once we know some of those thresholds, they can help policy makers make informed decisions,” Merrill said.

And that’s what Murphy said she and her co-authors are hoping for: That lawmakers and others can use this information to reduce plastic, by crafting regulations to ban or reduce plastics, such as plastic bag or balloon bans, and encouraging small, local events such as beach cleanups.

“The science is clear: We need to reduce the amount of plastic that we’re producing and we need to improve collection and recycling to clean up what’s already out there,” said Murphy.

This year, in international talks on limiting plastic pollution, oil- and gas-producing countries succeeded in preventing language that would reduce the amount of plastics produced.

When Emily Little gave birth to her first child, sleeping together with her baby in bed was a given — despite all the public health messages telling her not to.

“I knew it was something that I wanted to do,” said Little, a perinatal health researcher and science communications consultant who has studied cultures around the world that bed-share. Little was drawn to the skin-to-skin closeness she could maintain with her baby throughout the night, and the ease of breastfeeding him without getting up. It felt natural to sleep the way mothers and babies had slept “since the beginning of human history,” she said.

So she began to research ways to reduce the risk to her baby. Bed-sharing has been found to be less risky for full-term infants in nonsmoking, sober homes who are exclusively breastfed: Check. Only the breastfeeding parent should sleep next to the baby: Check. Since babies are less likely to suffocate on firm mattresses and without loose bedding, Little replaced her pillow-top mattress and got rid of all of her blankets and extra pillows. Because babies could fall off the bed or into a gap between the bed and the wall, Little pushed the bed up against the wall, and filled in the gap with foam.

Still, Little’s decision conflicts with advice from pediatricians and public health advocates, who warn that bed-sharing increases the risk that a baby will die during the night. For decades, U.S. pediatricians and public health officials have been warning that the only way to avoid sudden unexplained infant death (SUID) is to stick to the “ABCs of safe sleep” — always have the baby sleep Alone, on their Back, in a separate Crib empty of any pillows, blankets, stuffed animals and crib bumpers. One controversial campaign even depicted a baby lying next to a meat cleaver, sending the message that parents could be deadly weapons when sleeping next to a baby.

And it worked: The rate of sleep-related infant death declined significantly after the safe sleep campaigns began in the 1990s. But in recent decades, the rate has plateaued and even started to tick upward again, at the same time that bed-sharing has become more popular among parents. So some advocates are instead shifting to a “harm reduction” approach that acknowledges parents want to sleep with their infants and offers tips on how to make it as safe as possible.

“Abstinence-only messaging hasn’t worked, and parents often aren’t honest with their pediatricians when they’re asked. We all need to acknowledge that it’s practically inevitable,” said Susan Altfeld, a retired University of Illinois- Chicago professor who studied bed-sharing. “Developing new messages to educate parents on what specific behaviors are especially risky and what they can do to reduce those risks have the potential to effect change.”

Engage with our community-funded journalism as we delve into child care, transitional kindergarten, health and other issues affecting children from birth through age 5.

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A shifting message on infant bed-sharing

About 3,700 infants die suddenly and unexpectedly each year in the U.S, a number that has remained stubbornly high for decades, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The risk of sharing sleep surface is real: Infants who sleep with adults are two to 10 times more likely to die than those who sleep alone in a crib, depending on their specific risk factors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP, wrote in its most recent safe sleep guidelines.

Nonetheless, the percentage of parents in the U.S. who said they usually bed-share has grown, from about 6% in 1993 to 24% in 2015. And in 2015, 61.4 of respondents reported bed-sharing with their infant at least occasionally. Although more recent national data are not available, more than a quarter of mothers in California said they “always or often” bed-shared in 2020-22.

Little touts the positive aspects of bed-sharing and helps families mitigate the risks.

(Tanya Goehring / For The Times)

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La Leche League International, a breastfeeding advocacy organization, offers the “Safe Sleep 7” on their website to help parents bed-share more safely. Little codified her own “harm reduction” advice for safer bed-sharing in an online discussion guide for other parents to help encourage nuanced conversation between parents and healthcare providers to help mitigate the risks of what is at least an occasional practice for most parents. She also touts the positive aspects of bed-sharing and helps families mitigate the risks.

Babies who share a bed with their mothers, for example, have been shown to breastfeed longer. Parents who plan ahead and bed-share more safely may avoid falling asleep accidentally with a baby in the most unsafe of situations — a reclining chair or sofa. And many parents feel it strengthens their bond with their baby, she said.

“Infants have the biological expectation to be in close contact with their caregivers all the time, especially in the early months,” Little said. “Denying that because we as a society are unable to have a conversation about risk mitigation and harm reduction is really doing a disservice to infant well-being and mental health.”

Pushback from safe sleep advocates

The pediatrics academy, in its 2022 guidelines, acknowledges that parents may “choose to routinely bed share for a variety of reasons,” and offers a few safety suggestions if a parent “unintentionally” falls asleep with their baby. “However, on the basis of the evidence, the AAP is unable to recommend bed sharing under any circumstances,” the guidelines state.

It’s almost impossible to assess whether a family is truly a low risk when it comes to bed-sharing, especially as many are not forthcoming with their physician about drinking, smoking and drug use, said Dr. Rachel Moon, a pediatrician and researcher at the University of Virginia medical school, and lead author of the AAP report. Even if a parent is a low risk some nights, when they have a glass of wine one evening, they suddenly tip into a high-risk category, she said.

“I knew it was something that I wanted to do,” Little, shown with her family, said about bed-sharing with her baby.

(Tanya Goehring / For The Times)

Moon said bed-sharing advice has been a topic of conversation for years in the academy, but given the evidence of risk, the group decided to warn against the practice in all situations.

“It’s not responsible for us to give [parents] permission,” said Moon, who deals with sleep-related deaths in her role as a researcher. “Every day I deal with babies who have died, and if it happened in a bed-sharing situation, [parents] regret it. I deal with this enough that I don’t want anybody to have that regret.”

Changing the messaging on safe sleep would be a “slippery slope,” said Deanne Tilton Durfee, executive director of the Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, which runs L.A. County’s safe sleep campaign. “You have to be extremely clear with messaging” because many parents may not pay attention to the details, she said.

In 2024, 46 infants in Los Angeles County died as they slept, and almost all of them involved bed-sharing, Durfee said.

The reality in parents’ homes

Pachet Bryant, a mother in Mission Viejo, felt deeply committed to sleeping with her new baby from the moment she gave birth. “You’re growing a baby for nine to 10 months, and all of a sudden for them to be separated from your heart, from your presence, from your smell, can be traumatic,” she said.

But she wanted to do it as safely as possible. So when lactation consultant Asaiah Harville began to work with her, the consultant offered tailored advice to the new mother’s situation, which Bryant took “very, very seriously.” Bryant had already been doing some research of her own and was able to modify her space accordingly. She also reevaluated every night whether she felt it was safe for her baby to sleep in the bed; on nights when she was too exhausted, she put her daughter to sleep in a bassinet instead.

“We know that parents are either intentionally or unintentionally at some point going to wind up falling asleep with their baby, and we have to think about creating the safest possible environment for that,” Harville said. In the lived reality of an individual family’s home, she said, “we can’t just teach abstinence.”

This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children, from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.

During the government shutdown, the U.S. Forest Service completed prescribed burns on more than 127,000 acres, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz announced in an internal memo welcoming back furloughed employees. During the same time frame in 2023 and 2024, the Forest Service completed a comparable amount of work, indicating the agency managed to take advantage of prime weather for burns even with a reduced workforce.

“Despite the disruption, we accomplished a great deal together,” the memo, first reported by the Hotshot Wake Up and verified by The Times, said. “We advanced timber sales that strengthen local economies, kept recreation sites open and safe for public enjoyment, and carried out critical wildfire response and active management work.”

By comparison, the Forest Service completed about 200,000 acres of prescribed burns in 2023 from Oct. 1 through Nov. 12 — the same span as the 2025 shutdown — and in 2024, it burned roughly 90,000 acres during that time frame, according to a Forest Service database that tracks hazardous fuel treatment work.

The latest contingency plan for the Forest Service — the largest federal firefighting entity in the country — called for continuing essential work during a shutdown, including responding to and suppressing wildfires.

The plan also involves furloughing roughly 30% of the service’s workforce, including those who oversee forest-use permit processing and public recreation, as well as researchers studying forest health and the timber market. Yet fuel treatment work, such as prescribed burning and mechanically thinning forests, is conducted by many of the same personnel responsible for putting out fires — the part of the workforce that avoided the furloughs.

That was important, given that significant fire activity across the West in 2024 inhibited the Forest Service from reducing wildfire risk on as many acres. So, this year, the Forest Service has been playing catch-up.

However, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit representing current and former federal firefighters, found in October that Forest Service fuel management work in 2025 was down by 38% compared with recent years. The organization said that downturn was largely due to staff and resource cuts championed by President Trump’s cost-cutting team at the start of his second administration.

The Forest Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has challenged the federal government to match state investments in wildfire risk reduction work, and in July even sent the White House a draft executive order that Newsom said would accomplish exactly that.

In 2021, the state and U.S. Forest Service agreed to ramp up their yearly fuel treatment work in California to 500,000 acres each by 2025.

In 2023, the most recent year both state and federal data are available, the state reached 415,000 acres, and the Forest Service reached 311,000, according to a state dashboard. From 2021 to 2024, the state invested $4.3 billion to complete that work, whereas the Forest Service invested $3.1 billion.

This past weekend’s rain could mark an early start to prescribed-burn season in Southern California — home to a handful of national forests, including the Los Angeles and San Bernardino forests — as federal employees return to work until at least the end of January, when the agreed-upon funding is set to expire.

“I’m profoundly grateful to welcome our furloughed employees back as the government reopens,” Schultz said in the memo. “I look forward to getting the entire team back together to continue and build upon the work that we’ve begun this new fiscal year.”