Very sad and dramatic. But impossible to determine the scope of the problem from something like that. Decayed Albatross corpses without plastic debris may not have made it to the film; the skeptic in me always wants to find formal studies, if any.
Google Scholar search yielded only a few hits for me using the word albatross and midway as keywords. Most were studies done over ten years ago; such as these:
These seem to indicate that plastic ingestion is possibly a problem, though not as bad as researchers expected. Actual contribution to increased mortality is not clear.
I like your plague analogy, we are like the plague. We will continue to grow and expand until we run out of food, or until the environment we live in changes to the point where we can't survive, or we adapt to the new world as it has become.
As I understand it, in ecology theory, humans are considered K-strategists.
Bacterial plagues would be considered r-strategists.
One group is characterized (in part) by fast reproduction, short lifetimes, and a population that grows very quickly to the limit of local resources, at which point the population quickly crashes. This pattern is due to overuse of the resources and a reproduction rate generally independent of external controls.
The other group is characterized (in part) by slower reproduction, longer lifetimes and smaller number of offspring, and on reaching the limit of local resources the population stabilizes. This pattern is sometimes due to behavioral changes made by that group on their reproductive and mating patterns.
