Juvenile green turtles migrating along the temperate SW Atlantic
alternate between plastic-polluted foraging habitats and fisheries
that are a direct threat to their populations. Most of these
animals were born in, and thus will eventually reproduce at,
Ascension Island (Proietti et al., 2009; Prosdocimi et al., 2012).
Some authors suggest that the population is recovering, although
it is far from its original numbers (Broderick et al., 2006). The impact
of plastic ingestion on population trends is unknown. To our
knowledge, this is the first study that explores exposure to plastic
through a spatially explicit approach that associates debris and
turtle distributions at the local scale. We identified the Río de la
Plata estuarine front as a risk area of conservation concern for
young green turtles.