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A new study from Stanford has revealed the staggering and concerning amount of microplastics whales eat every day.

The biggest animals on Earth are forced to consume up to 10,000 of the tiniest man-made pollutants on a daily basis, a number far higher than previously thought, scientists found. The study, published in the Nature Communications journal this week, shows that the consumption of microplastics comes not from the mammal gulping them down directly in ocean water, but through one giant step down in the food chain as they eat their primary prey, krill.

“There’s only one link,” study co-author Matthew Savoca told Stanford News. “The krill eat the plastic, and then the whale eats the krill.”

Microplastics are a growing concern to the health of the world's oceans, where they are now widespread. Around the size of a grain of rice, the toxic particles are polymer fragments created through the erosion of plastic waste. They have also been found in a range of far-flung environments, from the floor of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Mount Everest and even in the fresh Antarctic snow.

Krill, the shrimp-like crustacean that forms almost the entirety of the blue whale’s diet, are able to consume microplastics due to their "gastric mill"-type digestion system and complex digestive enzymes.

As part of a decades-long research project on the habits of whales, scientists at Stanford studied the feeding channels of blue, fin and humpback whales around 50 to 250 yards below the water surface. This region of the ocean is home to the highest population of microplastic-filled krill. The amount of microplastics at that depth, largely in the intestines of the crustacean, is tenfold higher than on the surface, the study found.

Specifically, the study found that blue whales, which can weigh up to 200 tons and consume around 4 tons of krill a day, eat 10,000 toxic particles a day, while the humpback whale, which primarily eats small fish, consume around 200,000 pieces of microplastics. Fin whales, who eat both krill and fish, ingest between 3 million and 10 million pieces.

Little is known about what this mass consumption of plastic may do to the megafauna, but scientists are concerned.

“It could be scratching the linings of their stomach. It could be absorbed into the bloodstream, or it could all pass through the animal. We don’t know yet,” lead study author Shirel Kahane-Rapport wrote.

Scientists think that the consumption of microplastics by krill may make them less fleshy, reducing the caloric value to their giant predators.

“If patches are dense with prey but not nutritious, that is a waste of their time, because they’ve eaten something that is essentially garbage," wrote Kahane-Rapport. "It’s like training for a marathon and eating only jelly beans.”

Find the full study in Nature Communications.

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