To date, research has focused on a valuable and exhaustive
inventory of the debris ingested and its consequences, but why
plastic ingestion occurs and the conditions that enable it are far
from being understood. It has been suggested that leatherbacks
mistake gelatinous plankton for floating plastic bags (Bjorndal,
1997; Mrosovsky et al., 2009); thus zooplanktivorous turtles would
be particularly vulnerable to ingestion of plastic debris.