A male Cuvier’s beaked whale was mistaken for a pregnant female because of its swollen belly. In fact, it was filled to the brim with 40 kilograms of hard, calcified plastic garbage. | cbcasithappens
CBC RadioDarrell Blatchley helps perform a necropsy on a dead beached whale in the Philippines.In fact, it was a severely emaciated juvenile male Cuvier's beaked whale, filled to the brim with 40 kilograms of hard, calcified plastic garbage. The whale was found on the beach near the town of Mabini.
"As we started to cut it open, I put my hand down inside the stomach, immediately hitting hard debris," Darrell Blatchley, owner of the D'Bone Collector Museum in Davao City, told"It was obvious that it wasn't its normal food, because this animal should be eating squids and fishes." Blatchley, who helped with the necropsy conducted by the country's Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, says it's the biggest collection of plastic he's seen inside an animal, all calcified into a rock-hard lump the size of two basketballs.
"As we started to pull it out, the first one was a grocery bag — and then it was literally just bag after bag after bag," he said.Since the 1950s, human beings have produced 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic — and 6.3 billion tonnes of that has already become waste,In 2015, the same researchers found that somewhere between 4.8 million and 12.7 million tonnes of plastic from people living within 50 kilometres of coastlines had already made its way into our oceans.
Between 4.8 million and 12.7 million tonnes of plastic from people living within 50 kilometres of coastlines had made its way into our oceans, according to a 2015 study.
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