In the marine environment plastic bags alone kill at least 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. The plastic constricts the animals’ movements or kills the marine animal through starvation, exhaustion, or infection. Worse yet, after an animal is killed, its body decomposes and the plastic is released back into the environment where it can kill again.
Plastic Blows!
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Trash, Plastic & The Ocean
Have you heard of a North Pacific Subtropical Gyre? This is a slow spinning, underwater current that moves clockwise, created by a high pressure system of air currents. You will find this underwater current basically in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean..
The area around this gyre is called an oceanic desert... so, just like the deserts on land, not so lush with larger species.. all you really find in this oceanic desert is pretty much only tiny, tiny phytoplankton, and very few bigger fish or mammals... AND... guess what else?
MILLIONS and millions pounds of TRASH.. mostly PLASTIC!!! This underwater current has became the LARGEST dump in the WORLD! Smack dab in the middle of the Ocean..
Unfortunately that is not enough... this gyre has had BABIES!!! Two of them, known as the “Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches”. The Eastern runs through Hawaii and California, and the Western comes out of Japan and west of Hawaii.. they are connected with a thin 6,000-mile long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone.
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“Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.” (quote source)
As you might know, plastic does NOT biodegrade.. it photodegrades. Which is a process that requires sunlight; it SLOWLY breaks down into smaller and smaller particles. The estimated time for a plastic bag to break down is about a 1000 years. Recent studies have found that plastic breaks down faster in the water: National Geographic Article
Now, you know how you may have pondered at a smooth rock, picked from the water.. how the rock has gotten polished by the currents.. Same thing happens to plastic in the Ocean. Plastic polymers (pieces) are sponges for DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), and other oily toxic pollutants. Those tiny plankton critters I mentioned earlier end up ingesting it.. which in turn is eaten by fish and birds.. and WHO do you suppose like to eat fish?? US DOLPHINS!! WE end up with this contaminated food for dinner!! This plastic villain has reached the very depth of our GREAT food chain... and this is not good for anyones health!!
250 billion pounds of raw plastic pellets produced ANNUALLY is turned into a tremendous amount of STUFF..
Do we have a mathematic genius in the house...?? How much oil is that??? Who pays for that??? There needs to be 430, 000 gallons of oil to create 100 million nondegradable plastic bags.. There’s between 4 trillion to 5 trillion plastic bags used world wide ANNUALLY!!!! How much oil is THAT? YIKES! It does not make sense to me at all.. to use such a resource like oil for something like a plastic bag which gets dumped quicker than Two-V (lol!!).. Does it to you? And the other thing that I can’t quite understand is; Why is plastic treated like a disposable object???? This is the big question to me.. as a dolphin in the great big sea.... Not even the holy sea cow has been able to answer me this one.. she just shakes her head..
About me: Hoku, Hawaiian for “star”, so named for her brilliant light coloring. She qualifies as an example of calves born with “leucism” (albino’s with dark eyes). As such calves are born every few years into the Makua pod, they are not quite as significant as a white buffalo.
What is significant is that Hoku has survived to a subadult. Most “white” calves won’t live through their first year. Albino animals are more likely to have some other genetic “specialties,” resulting in problems affecting with their vision, increased likelihood of sunburn, and more importantly for this youngster, they are very conspicuous to predators.
Spinner dolphins are the smallest dolphin in Hawaii, about 5 feet long and 150 or so pounds. Since they don’t have the body size to defend themselves, they behave like a herd of horses or gazelles. They stick close to each other, and the more they look and act exactly alike, the harder it is for a predator to pick one out of the pod. When one of the animals “stick out”, such as one much lighter colored, the predator can zoom in on them.
Although dolphins rely much more on their acoustic sense of sonar, vision is still important to them. Dolphins have special eyes that adjust to see just as well below water as they do above water. Spinner dolphins, who feed at night, turn off their sonar while in their daytime resting grounds, thus saving quite a bit of energy by relying on their visual sense instead. While resting, they watch for cues from pod members alerting of danger.
Hoku thanks you for your support on behalf of all the Spinners of Makua, and hopes you will think of her when gazing into the night skies *.
What is the Solution To Our Trash Problem In the Ocean?
((You)) can help alleviate the mounting and blowing trash problem by making environmentally aware decisions in everyday living.
If you don’t know what an “environmentally aware” decision is. I am here to help YOU raise your awareness of the circles you create through your day, and how to make them circles come back to YOU, me, and all the rest of us on this great planet! WE CAN DO IT!
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency of the U.S.A) have a great site where you can easily learn What You Can Do
Need Info On Where To Recycle In Your Area? How to dispose hazardous toxic materials? Visit Earth911.com
Be A Wild Dolphin Advocate! Join us making a difference!
Dare to keep US off drugs! Visit ARIEANNE to learn what to do with medical waste!
Let's keep our beaches clean! Visit TWO-V for details! SILVER can tell you why us Dolphins need to remain Wild & Free and far, far from any tank, trainers or "entertainment" centers. RIPCURL can to.. He'll also answer any question you may have on Dolphin Drive Hunts!
Got a question around why we need to keep a close eye on the fishing industry, as thousands of Dolphins are annually - still!! - caught, and killed in fishing nets, ask KIKO
I made my first video slideshow and wanted to share it with you. The musician (Elizabeth Ann Middleton) is one I found through MySpace, and she generously let me use her music to set to my images. Visit her MySpace page here - http://www.myspace.com/pianorama - she's fantastic! :-)
The mission of Green Cross International is to help ensure a just, sustainable and secure future for all by fostering a value shift and cultivating a new sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility in humanity's relationship with nature.
Thanks for having joined the Scuba Diving Community as a friend. I hope to see you online soon in our community and share your experience with other divers as well as take advantage of all the information we have about scuba diving on the 3000+ pages. I wish you lots of safe and fun dives. Patrik
PLASTIC KILLS!
WDF TOTE INSTEAD OF PLASTIC
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