Fill in the Blanks Plastic PollutionOnline version Fill in the gaps with suitable words. by Irina Gavrilova 1 synthetic species humans observation stomach scientists particles commercially globe marine It's not news that wild creatures gulp down plastic . The first scientific of this problem came from the of a seabird in 1969 . Three years later , reported that fish off the coast of southern New England were consuming tiny plastic . Since then , well over 250 scientific papers have described that fish are ingesting microplastics around the . Researchers studied this problem in 555 fish worldwide . More than two - thirds marine fish including those that are important and consumed by ingested particles of all sizes .