A video has emerged showing a sperm whale entangled in rubbish swimming up to a group of divers and apparently asking them for help
A video has emerged showing the moving moment a sperm whale entangled in rubbish swims up to a group of divers and appears to ask them for help.
In the video, which was filmed at an undisclosed location in the Indian Ocean, the sperm whale can be seen swimming right up to a group of divers with its mouth and part of its head entangled in a web of rubbish and plants. The whale remains next to the divers, with its mouth agape, while one of the female divers carefully untangles and removes the rubbish from the whale’s jaws. Once the whale is free – rather than vanish straight back into the deep blue – the whale hangs around the divers for a while.
Although this particular story has a happy ending this isn’t the case for most marine creatures tangled in our rubbish. It’s very hard to estimate both how much rubbish enters our oceans each year and how much is already floating around entangling animals. We know that 80 per cent of the rubbish in our oceans is plastic waste and recent figures suggest that 8 million pieces of plastic pollution enter the oceans of the world every single day. Over the course of a year this amounts to 12 million tonnes.
As for how much plastic waste might have already accumulated in the ocean, one recent study estimated that there were already around 171 trillion pieces of plastic floating on the surface of the ocean alone. In addition to this waste, there’s the plastic rubbish that has sunken to the sea bed and, of course, the ever-growing threat of microplastics, which have even been found in humans through our consumption of seafood.
Plastic pollution has been found in every single corner of the oceans surveyed so far – from the deepest ocean trenches to the polar oceans. And this is only plastic waste; the problem is further compounded with other human-generated waste such as abandoned, lost and discarded fishing nets and lines (ghost gear), non-plastic waste and chemical pollution.
The oceanic plastic pollution situation is far from improving. In fact, it’s getting worse, with researchers estimating that the amount of plastic waste finding its way into the oceans each year could triple by 2040.
If all that plastic and other waste simply floated about in the ocean then that would be bad enough, but as the whale in the video demonstrates, many animals consume the plastic thinking it’s a tasty colourful morsel. A WWF study estimated that 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution every year. And that’s only the ones we know about. Many more marine mammals, turtles and seabirds are likely to be killed through plastic consumption in the coming years.
And so, while this particular sperm whale was one of the lucky ones, other animals may not be so lucky to avoid another – potentially deadly – encounter with the plastic pollution contaminating the oceans.
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