Whale dies from eating plastic bags as ocean pollution rears its ugly head. (2019, March 19). Retrieved from https://news.theceomagazine.com/news/whale-found-plastic-bags-in-its-stomach/
As old as the tale gets, another whale washed up on the Philippine shore, full of plastic. It was first reported to be vomiting blood, but after it died and the museum team performed a necropsy, “They found a mass of plastic bags as well as 16 rice sacks and four banana plantation bags in its stomach.” there was 40 kg of plastic in that whale, and with that one museum alone, they’ve reported 57 dead whales and dolphins over the past decade that died due to plastic in the ocean. This comes just months after a sperm whale washed up on Indonesian shores with a hundred plastic cups, bags and even flip-flops. The team that recovered it said the stomach was literally hard as a baseball after all the plastic got packed inside it.
And sperm whales are huge, and spooky. It’s hard to think that a creature capable of tangling with gigantic squids can be taken down by so much as plastic, but it happens. And at the rate that our plastic dumping rates increase (4% more every year according to the WWF), it would stand to reason that the rate of large mammals will increase too. You have to look at the ocean like any other natural area to fully understand what must be happening to it. If we commission convicts and volunteers to clean the side of streets and pick up trash we left in forests, it stands to reason that we can do the same in the oceans. If we dumped 13 million tons of trash in the savannah and elephants started to drop as much as the whales are, there’d be a bigger outcry.
The horrible part of this story was that the culprit was identified! The plastic was intact enough to be able to read the names of the companies on the plastic bags. However, going after the companies would be impossible because companies would just say it wasn’t them (directly). Do you really think we would be more motivated to change if the animal was an elephant rather than a whale? Thanks for writing about this issue so that more people can learn about what the whales are going through.
I really appreciate you writing this abstract. This is and will continue to be a serious issue if action is not taken. I think your point about elephant deaths having a greater impact on motivating humans to lessen their willingness to litter is interesting given that elephants are on land animals that humans can more easily see. I think the key plan to prevent fatalities like this is to limit the amount of plastic used and littered into the ocean. To do this, I think we should start placing a tax on plastic.
Wow, this is a heartbreaking story. It is awful to hear how our irresponsibility leads directly to issues like this. What do you think is the best approach to solving this issue and preventing this from happening in the future?
This story made me want to throw up. It’s digusting how humans can be so inconsiderate of what their brining into this world, and how it affects beautiful life forms. I remeber seeing a dead whale washed up on the beach when I was around ten, it was massived and it died because a massive ship had hit it. This story is just another remind of how humans abuse other species, with out thinking twice.
That’s so crazy that such a tiny plastic bag can take down such a huge animal. I feel that because these people don’t put into perspective how their daily choices affect these innocent animals, they continue to litter in the ocean, creating this ongoing cycle.