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Plastic. It's all over the ocean. And for sea turtles. It's a killer at least a thousand die every year because they swallow plastic or get tangled up in it

So why do sea turtles run into plastic so often?

And why the heck are they eating it?

Scientists believed the turtles may think they're biting into their prey,

like a jellyfish, when they come across some plastics. But now a study finds the smell of

plastic may also be attractive. Researchers exposed 15 loggerhead turtles to different odors in the lab.

They tested the animal's response to the smell of turtle food, distilled water, clean plastic, and also to biofowl plastic.

That's plastic that has marine organisms growing all over it,

which is a common occurrence in the sea and on beaches.

It gets occupied by algae and other organisms pretty quickly and it doesn't take very long. I mean if you leave a plastic water bottle sitting even on the sand for, you know, a week, it's liable to get

covered in these organisms. And once it's covered in biofowl, that's what makes it so appetizing to turtles.

Kala Gohforth, a PhD student in biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The research team found that the Logger turtles had similar responses to biofowl plastic as to their normal food.

So they have to come up to breathe and then we know that they can detect airborne odors, so when they find that there's an odor of interest in the air, they'll spend an increased amount of time at the surface with their nostrils out of the water.

We found that the turtle spent more time with their nostrils out of the water when there was this

biofiled plastic odor or a food odor.

The studies in the journal Current Biology, the researchers don't know exactly what makes bio-phout plastic smell so tasty to turtles.

But they think a compound called dimethyl sulfide might be the culprit.

It's a chemical that we know that sea turtles can detect and

seabirds and some fishes are also capable of detecting it and they all use

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