by Arjun Walia, The Pulse:
- The Facts:
- New research estimates that Blue whales consume up to 10 million pieces of microplastic every day, suggesting that the omnipresent pollution poses a bigger danger to the world’s largest animal than previously thought.
- Plastics are sometimes ingested through their prey, which humans also eat.
- 4.4 trillion pieces of microplastics pollute the world’s upper oceans.
- They have a combined weight of 82,000 to 578,000 tons which equals approximately 30 billion 500-ml plastic water bottles.
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- Reflect On:
- We have a “green washing revolution” that is driven by big business and profit as opposed to really focusing on cleaning up our planet.
- The big shift here is going to be in changing our relationship to life, one another, and our planet.
- This is key as opposed to the material reductionism that guides the vast majority of our current culture
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Fragments of plastic have been found almost everywhere in our oceans. 24.4 trillion pieces of microplastics pollute the world’s upper oceans. They have a combined weight of 82,000 to 578,000 tons which equals approximately 30 billion 500-ml plastic water bottles worth of plastic.
It’s a huge problem, and marine life has been affected for quite some time. Perhaps this is why these microplastics have also been found inside human organs and blood.
A new study has found that Blue whales consume up to 10 million pieces of microplastic every day, posing a dangerous situation for the worlds largest largest animal than previously thought. The study was recently published in Nature Communications.
A US-led research team put tags on 191 blue fin and humpback whales that live off the coast of California to observe their movements. The whales mostly fed at depths of between 50 to 250 meters (165-820 feet), which is home to the greatest concentration of microplastics.
The researchers then estimated the size and number of mouthfuls the whales had daily, including what was filtered out, and modelled three different scenarios. Under the most likely scenario, the blue whales ate up to 10 million microplastic pieces a day. Over the 90-120 day annual feeding season, that represents more than a billion pieces a year.
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The kicker is the fact that these whales aren’t just gulping up these microplastics through ocean water. According to the researchers, 99 percent of the microplastics enter into the whales because they (the microplastics) are already inside their prey. Humans also consume this pray, and other marine life that is no doubt also inundated with these microplastics.
We already know that humans ingest and inhale microplastics, up to 121,000 microparticles per year for an adult, or as one controversial “comparison” puts it, the equivalent of a credit card (5 grams) per week.
