The Effects on Marine Life

In my Introduction post here on my blog I posted some disturbing photographs of marine animals being entangled in plastic waste, or in abandoned fishing nets. For me that is just one thing that goes right in to my heart. I just think of it as the turtle Crush in finding nemo (Flyt in Swedish) but behind the scenes after the movie, when his children are all grown up, and he’s alone and entangled in a fishing net, where he can’t get food or air, and eventually dies.

 National Geographic posted a really short video about how it feels to be an ocean animal stuck in a plastic bag...... It's 1,5 minute of your life.

The ocean is huge, and us humans still haven’t explored it all. Yet, there are so much footage of marine life being stuck in plastics, or dead with their stomachs full of it. That just proves that this is a huge problem, for the people that don’t believe it yet, or who just don’t care.

The biggest problem of animals being affected by plastic is usually not by accident, for example swimming in to it and get stuck. The problem is that they believe it’s food. National Geographic posted an article about a new study where they found that a lot of plastics in the ocean smell like food. 
The plastics become covered by algae that smells like actual food for fish, or other marine life, such as turtles, whales, and birds, and they eat it. Since plastic is non-biodegradable (it can not break down) animal life can’t digest it, which creates complications in their bodies that leads to death.

Article - why animals eat the plastic

The newest story in this topic is the sperm whale that was found dead off the coast in Spain with
64 pounds (29 kilos) of plastic waste in its digestive system! If plastic waste in the oceans keeps progressing at this rate, scientists believe there will be more plastic pieces in the ocean than fish by 2050. 
National Geographic Sperm Whale Article

This to me is really scary, and not a future that I want for this earth. The biggest problem is still something we can easily do something about in our everyday life with some effort. That is to reduce single use plastic bags, plastic bottles, and straws. You can do it!







The only positive thing about some of these photos are that the animals are saved from the plastic, but there are plenty of animals that we don't discover that are stuck, or die from eating plastic.



Earlier this year, around 300 turtles died from being entagled in fishing nets outside Mexico, if you didn't see it in the news, you can read about it in this article.

 https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/300-turtles-die-trapped-in-nets/








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction

Image
Hello dear followers, whom are probably only at this time a handful of people. So, Hello professor Hillyer, mom, dad, the other Jo and maybe even my boyfriend KJ. If there are readers out there already that I don’t know yet, and that don’t know me. My name is Johanna Englund and I am a foreign student athlete from Gothenburg Sweden at American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts. I am a senior Marketing major and this is my blog about plastic waste in the ocean and its effects on the marine life. The goal with this blog is to with the help of National Geographic’s campaign  Planet or Plastic?  promote their cause and raise awareness about the situation, and to make you guys start thinking about it, and to hopefully start helping out. If I can with the help of this blog make people, even if it’s 100 000 (I wish), 50 or 1 person, to start acting regarding their consumption of plastic in their everyday life we have achieved something good. I know you...
Read more

Part 2- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Image
Hello again and welcome back, or just welcome to The Planet or Plastic blogg. My first post was just an introduction about general topics, and today it will be about Mother Nature and her skills..... Have you ever heard about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Honestly, I hadn’t until earlier this semester! From my biology teacher. I definitely knew about the issue of plastic waste in the ocean because I follow different accounts about it on Instagram, and you can see it a lot on Facebook for example. The photos/videos, and places people can travel to today is a lot wider than before and we are now more aware than ever about the massive amount of plastic waste in the ocean.  We know that the plastic waste float around everywhere in the ocean, but it mostly piles up in larger areas due to wind and currents in the ocean called patches. Or because Mother Nature is helping us clean it up, it’s like she’s sweeping it into piles in the house for us to throw out. At least th...
Read more