Research by Lindsay Young, at the University of Hawaii, and her colleagues compared the food ingested by Laysan albatross chicks in two populations, more than 1,900 kilometers apart in the Pacific Ocean. Their data show that while both populations consumed roughly the same amount of actual food, chicks in the western Pacific near Kure ingested 10 times more plastic than chicks near Oahu. In addition, the Kure chicks had 4 times as many plastic pieces and these pieces were, on average, twice as large as those of the Oahu chicks.