317 bits of plastic found in sea dead turtle..

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A GIANT sea turtle has been found dead after swallowing more than 300 bits of PLASTIC.

The helpless creature starved to death because its guts were clogged with debris including bags, lids, tape and fishing line.

The 317 separate pieces of rubbish found inside it by horrified experts were enough to cover an entire table top.

Scientists say the incident is one of the worst cases of pollution in open water ever recorded.

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The turtle was found dead on a beach at Ballina, New South Wales, on the eastern coast of Australia. Marine biologist Rochelle Ferris said: "It just shows how much plastic there is out there in the ocean. The turtle's digestive system just shut down."

Recent studies show a third of all sea turtles are being slowly poisoned by marine litter, with at least 50 cases reported in Australia alone every year.

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A plastic bag can look like a squid to a hungry turtle while a piece of white lid may appear to be a shellfish.

Sea turtle populations around the world are also increasingly in danger from pollution, illegal fishing and becoming tangled in nets.

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link to full article

not really much to say about this other than the usual, "look what were doing to the planet and wildlife" which has already been said a thousand times before..

having said that... it is still shocking and upsetting to see our destruction of this planet and inhabitants first hand like this in "black and white" as it were..

Dang. Humans suck so much

We are going to kill every single thing on this freaking planet. I hope we get wiped out and the planet with all the animals gets saved. Humans are the problem that is killing mother earth.

We suck.

Maybe humans are indeed on the brink of their extinction. And instinctively sensing it, they just feel like leaving a huge pile of garbage behind, sign that they were here too, at some point in time. Terrible creatures, it is true...

all i can say is thats what we get for being lazy our own extinction we whipe plants out our own animals we eat they die off its like no ones keeping track and every ones still sneaking around droping theres wastes where ever they please we have no plane or even the abillity to try hope some day i can be of some more help then just strong words and a waging finger

The worlds biggest landfill is in the ocean

It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean. The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas [source: LA Times]. The Western Garbage Patch forms east of Japan and west of Hawaii. Each swirling mass of refuse is massive and collects trash from all over the world. The patches are connected by a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone. Research flights showed that significant amounts of trash also accumulate in the Convergence Zone.

The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic [source: UN Environment Program]. In some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton by a ratio of six to one. Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean [source: Greenpeace]. Seventy percent of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the ocean floor [source: Greenpeace]. The rest floats; much of it ends up in gyres and the massive garbage patches that form there, with some plastic eventually washing up on a distant shore.

science.howstuffworks.com...


Isn't cleanup possible? Shouldn't it be a priority?

Solutions offered by the public range from thoughtful to wacky: “Why couldn’t it be possible to collect the larger pieces of trash by skimming the most polluted concentrations with troll nets and attaching them to helicopters that would then deposit them into the path of the ongoing lava flow of Kilauea to be consumed and incorporated into new rock?” one person asked in a blog comment. Other ideas include vacuuming the sea and converting the plastic into an alternative energy source (plastics are made from petroleum).

discovermagazine.com...:int=2&-C=

reply to post by JustBreathe11


Yea. "We" suck.

"We" are the problem.

"We" are killing the planet.

"We" are evil.

"We" need to be exterminated, at least, most of us. No point in killing -all- of us, right?
Maybe kill off -most- of "us", and save a few million to keep the Human species alive. We'll lead civilization into a new golden era of peace and prosperity.


... Sounds like the NWO's grand plan.

At UW, they are testing the waters of Puget Sound. From what I understand, every time they collect a sample, anywhere in the sound, they always pull up plastic. The biggest problem is tiny little plastic balls, like the scrubbers found in face or body wash. The balls often come from people who wash at home, then the balls bypass water treatment because of their size, and end up in the sound. Often these balls are found in animal life. Those balls are just one of the many plastic problems we have in the ocean.

UW has a campaign warning people about the plastic, but I don't think people collectively want to do something about it. I get the feeling that people do care, but don't want to change their life conveniences to save sea creatures.

Even if hundreds of beautiful creatures die, I don't think the majority of mankind will change their ways. Some will, but I don't know if it will make a difference.
I believe the only way to clean up ocean plastic is to offer a biodegradable, non-toxic alternative. I don't know if that's possible.

Natures garbage disposal.

Awesome that we have these animals cleaning up after us!

reply to post by Misterlondon


its shocking that even in hundreds of thousands(maybe millions) anilmals will still kep dying from the pacific garbage patch because plastic takes so long to photodegrade and even then it leaves toxic waste in the water. i think we should take several planes with giant extremly spaced nets and just keep going back and forth throught that garbage patch every year to get the worst of it out of parts of the ocean

I ate one of those turtles. Tastes like chicken.

Nobody on Earth gives a rats rear about all the trash floating in the oceans.

NOBODY. Because if they did....Plastic would be BANNED.

Originally posted by tinker9917
Isn't cleanup possible? Shouldn't it be a priority?

Other ideas include vacuuming the sea and converting the plastic into an alternative energy source (plastics are made from petroleum).

discovermagazine.com...:int=2&-C=

That will happen eventually, say when oil gets to $2000 a barrel, that stuff floating on the ocean will be quite valuable. with oil at only $100 a barrel, it's too cheap to incentivize anyone to recover that mess for economic reasons.

This is really sad, those plastic bag bits can just line the digestive tract and then no food can be absorbed, and the turtle will starve even with a full stomach.

Maybe through the process of "unnatural selection" (because the pollution is manmade) some turtles will eat less plastic, and survive to breed, whereas turtles that eat plastic indiscriminately will die off and breed less. Eventually, we' could have a new breed of "superturtles" who can recognize plastic and have the genes that makes them less likely to eat it. If that doesn't happen, a lot more turtles will die because there will surely be a plentiful supply of plastic in the ocean if they are willing to indiscriminately eat it. I also wonder, can't they do what some other animals do? Namely, get the food in their mouth, taste it, and decide whether to swallow it or spit it out? That plastic can't taste much like food, can it? Or maybe sea turtles don't have a sense of taste?

www.ivis.org... page 2 of pdf, 146 of paper:

Taste buds are present but are poorly characterized

I'm not sure exactly what that means. Does it mean we don't know much about them? Or that they are present but don't work too well?

They better evolve a better sense of taste fast or some other means of distinguishing inedible plastic, or they may not survive. I would suggest man stop polluting, but we all know that isn't going to happen. We can reduce pollution, but I suspect a lot of pollution in the Pacific is coming from third world countries. I have seen some plastic pollution flowing into the ocean on the west coast of the US, but I don't think it's nearly enough to account for those big garbage pools in the pacific.

Wow...just wow. We're all becoming straight on the paths to indirect murderers. This is completely shocking yet I'm sad to say that I don't think this will cause any changes. Mankind's greed and "need" of power dominants their humane feelings these days.

I don't think the public actually know about instances like this...well it's not publicised onto mainstream news and deemed unimportant compared to the football scores, or celebrities.

I just hope I see the day when humans die out and animals take over the world ha.

We should really be ashamed. Really.


reply to post by jam321

Of course, I completely agree....but not all that large quantity of plastic in the oceans are soley down to that. We are to blame as well.

Let's not forget that event like hurricanes, flooding, and tsunamis etc. also contribute to polluting our waters.

For the second time in a month, flood waters and trash from the city's landfill in Nanakuli were discharged into the ocean along Oahu's Leeward Coast Wednesday night.

www.kitv.com...

www.concordmonitor.com...

Scientists say a massive trash plume generated by Japan's tsunami is floating across the northern Pacific Ocean and heading east for Hawaii.

www.radioaustralianews.net.au...

Ocean of Rubbish

all of this happened over money, never forget it.

An animal never rates over a human. The only thing we need in the ocean is a healthy crop of phytoplankton to keep oxygen in the atmosphere. There are some tasty animals in the ocean and we can farm raise many of them that we use for food.

I'm almost 99.9% certain a V'ger like entity won't show up in the future looking for humpback whales.

If you want to get religious about it. Genesis.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish (fill) the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And on the off chance that we get nostalgic in the future we can bank DNA so we can recreate any animals we want.

My family and friends are grilling this weekend and we look forward to some tasty barbequed animal flesh.

reply to post by Lionhearte


Sounds like a bloody good plan too.

Looking at the bigger picture...exsterminate the vermin!!

Originally posted by JustBreathe11
Dang. Humans suck so much

We are going to kill every single thing on this freaking planet. I hope we get wiped out and the planet with all the animals gets saved. Humans are the problem that is killing mother earth.

We suck.

funny how everybody (including myself) tends to agree with this statement...we are the problem...and I wouldn't be so sad if we were all wiped out for our bad deeds which are evident all over the world...

Death couldn't be such a horrible thing anyways

Originally posted by Carseller4
Natures garbage disposal.

Awesome that we have these animals cleaning up after us!

[/quote
If you really feel that....
you are not really human...or
you are and i am not.....so humans
are evil and im not human....or game
some different planet.....How you can
even say it....???did you eat aal the time
mcdonalds.....

peace,
ekiusa

This has put me on a downer more than any conspiracy I've read on here!

I think we can change, unfortunately I think it may already be too late.

The Pacific is just a big toilet bowl of plastic bits. The little clear balls that are the pre-processed plastic look like fish eggs and lots of sea critters eat them, and sea birds too. This is not unusual. The plastic garbage goes down about 10 feet, it's not just on the surface, making it harder to clean.
Thankfully, there are people out there cleaning it up, just not as many as are tossing the trash. A large portion comes from Asia, not just the US.
I agree that plastic should be banned, but it won't. Instead, products should carry a "cradle-to-grave" cost. It would make everything more expensive, but we would learn to do without, repair and re-purpose.
It horrifies me that my legacy to the planet and my children may be a huge pile of garbage.