Turtles die after ingesting plastic bags

Today researces estimate that there are about 18,000 pieces of plastic bobbing around in every square kilometre of ocean.

Every day, ships throughout the world jettison 5.5 million items of waste into the sea; three times as much rubbish is dumped into the world’s oceans annually as the weight of fish caught; every year an estimated 7 billion tonnes of rubbish enters the world’s oceans; an autopsy on an eight-metre Bryde’s whale in Queensland in 2000 found that the whale’s stomach was packed with six square metres of plastic; and between 700,000 and one million seabirds are killed from entanglement or plastic ingestion each year. That’s without mentioning the one million plastic bags that are consumed per minute globally.

Sea turtles are particularly susceptible to the effects of marine rubbish due to the internal structure of their throats and die a slow and painful death. The plastic gets trapped in the gut, preventing food from going down and the spines prevent it from coming back up.
The trapped food decomposes, leaking gases into the body cavity and causing the animal to float.
The turtle then slowly starves to death or succumbs to other secondary life threatening conditions such as boat strike.

Sea turtles eat all sorts of things, and one of their favourite foods are jellyfish. But unfortunately, a plastic bag under water looks exactly like one of these delicacies. The turtle swims up to the ‘jellyfish’ and before it knows what is happening it has fallen victim to the killer bag. Turtles often get entangled in the handles or swim into the bags, unable to find their way out again.

Plastic bag and jellyfish in the sea

Plastic, plastic, plastic !!!!! It is everywhere and there is no way back. Not only for nature, but also for ourselves, plastic is a threat.