Plastic Affecting Sea Animals

Improved Essays
How Plastic is Affecting Sea Animals “But while there are infinite reasons to love and respect the ocean, it can sometimes feel like the human race is doing everything in its power to harm it.” ~Landess Kearns (qtd. in “11 Quotes About The Ocean That Remind Us To Protect It”) The Ocean has turned into a giant garbage can full of trash, plastic, and waste. It affects seabirds, sea turtles, and even whales by hurting or even killing them. One animal species that is directly affected by this change is sea turtles. Scientists discovered that sea turtles are eating floating plastic in the ocean. (Turtles Mistake Floating Plastic For Food.) Jellyfish is a staple for the diet of a turtle. It is easy to mistake a floating plastic bag for a jellyfish.

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    As a result, plastics usage is rapidly being increased in consumer and industrial products. Secondly, plastic goods do not biodegrade but instead break down into smaller pieces through sunlight. This process is also known as photodegradation. Plastic consumption will lead to insufficient stomach storage to marine animals hence reducing their food intake and eventually starve to death.…

    • 867 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Surfrider Foundation creatively exemplifies what human pollution and carelessness is resulting in such as creating compelling ads like “Fossil, Bag”. Trash islands, which is a result from human pollution, clutters the oceans as well as contaminates marine biology with plastic and plastic components. Unfortunately, humans will continue to contribute to the trash islands and the marine life epidemic by throwing their plastic products out the window and onto the ground as they live their irresponsible lives. The vicious cycle of human carelessness is resulting into the consumption of their very own trash: plastic bags and plastic products. The more that plastic is produced and dumped into the ocean, the more prevalent plastic really is within human daily life, as well as inside…

    • 724 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Bits of plastic, toothbrushes, packing straps, shavers, lawn chairs, bottle caps, coolers, crates, bags, and much more. As well as plastic bags, which are lethal to sea turtles, whales, and whale sharks when the indigestible material is engulfed and jams their digestive system. A whale, washed ashore in California in 2007, died of “unknown causes” but had 181 kilograms (400 pounds) of plastic in its stomach. Lost and discarded fishing gear causes major problems by entangling and killing marine mammals, birds, fish, and other marine life, as well as by endangering boat propellers and…

    • 902 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Marcus Eriksen and his colleagues explain in a 2014 article Plastic Pollution in the World 's Oceans, that there is an estimate of 5.25 trillion plastic particles weighing about 269,000 tons are floating in the world 's oceans. Also, according to Renee Cho in the 2011 article Our Oceans: A Plastic Soup, Cho states that an average amount of time for a plastic water bottle to decompose is around 450 years . Those fishes and other marine animals will be around the plastic waste for years before it decays or when someone removes it from the ocean. Surfrider and Rise above Plastic states that they strive for the best so that each and every sea creature can have a safe environment to live in and the way for that to be accomplished are to have decreased the amount of plastic in the…

    • 877 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Why Littering Is Bad

    • 357 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Plastic that is on the ground often goes through drains into the sea which sea animals may choke on. Therefore we know littering is hurting the environment and something must be done! Parg.…

    • 357 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Eddie The Sea Turtle

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages

    When turtles are omnivorous, they eat a variety of algae, jellyfish. Their predators are sharks and orcas eats sea turtles. Coral reefs are very important in the life of sea turtles. Turtles eat in reefs that are also shelter for turtles during their migration to find beach , Or warmer water, and a place for nesting. The turtles travel on the water currents during their migration.…

    • 591 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The attraction of trash to animals is a serious problem because of simple trash just laying around the streets, because they don’t know what it is. The article, “For Ocean animals, ‘Death by Plastic’ Could Be Occuring More Frequently” that is written by Elise Andrew states that, “Aside from just looking disgusting, all of this garbage poses a serious threat to wildlife who either confuse it as food or ingest it accidentally.”. Birds can mistakenly harm their young by using plastic to make their nest that can hurt the next generation. Macklin has also stated that for an animal’s head just to get stuck in a jar, it could cause serious problems such as overheating, suffocation, starvation, dehydrations, and eventually death. In conclusion, a lot of trash has been piled up around the world, killing harmless organisms that don’t have anything to do with…

    • 658 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The fish can end up with liver damage, messed up fin, reproduction rate and even death. Even the birds are affected by these spills as they feed from the fish in the oceans. This is such a problem, that there are people with a job to specifically clean these animals. One of the most recent big spills was the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Plastic pollution is one of the biggest causes of ocean pollution.…

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Each year, littering causes 1 million birds, 100,000 marine mammals, and 4,600 sea turtles to die. Guess who makes that happen? People! Guess who can stop that, EVERYONE! Innocent animals are dying because of litter in the ocean or any body of water.…

    • 256 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Effects Of Ocean Pollution

    • 2033 Words
    • 9 Pages

    Its sad watching marine life die because past generations and the present generation are careless and lazy to the point where the can't go a few steps to throw their rubbish away and leave it for it to get blown away into the water affecting marine life. Ocean pollution has many causes that can be fixed for example, sewage systems flowing to the ocean, oil spills, littering, and land runoffs but most of the solutions don't work. There are some solutions that are working like, Fishing for Energy and Plastic Pollution Institution but its working slowly. Ocean pollution can damage the reproductive system of marine species and even death and that species could go extinct. Plastic is most found in the ocean more than any other trash.…

    • 2033 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Littering is a negative impact of the plastic bags. Wind and water can carry plastic bags or plastic fragments to different places including city streets, rivers, sea and other natural environment (Environment Protection Authority [EPA] 2016). Consequently, the high mobility of plastic bags has significantly influenced marine animals, ecosystems and food chains (EPA 2016). Marine life and animals may be misled into eating plastic bags or plastic pieces, which pose risks to them by ingestion and entanglement (EPA 2016). Turtles are one of the marine animals that at risk of eating plastic bags, especially for young sea turtles which are more likely to mislead plastic bags as jellyfish (G. Balazs 1984).…

    • 1511 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Despite the continued negligence regarding the issue of plastic pollution, Suzanne Frazer, Co-Founder, Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawai 'i explains that “everyone will be affected by plastic polluting the ocean - we 're going to be swimming in it, surfing in it and ingesting chemicals from the plastic which accumulated through the marine food chain”…

    • 1215 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    They also eat plastic bags thinking that they are jellyfish. Life in the oceans is decreasing, the reasons are numerous and the effects are disastrous to the environment, thus measures are to be taken to insure no further deterioration happens especially to the creature inhabiting…

    • 848 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    With light weight, plastic bags can easily be moved a great distance by wind or water flow. They are trapped in trees, fences, or float in water, and increasingly causing the garbage patch to get bigger in the ocean. These are harmful to wildlife and marine life because some animals mistake the plastic bags for food and consume them. There are some cases animals become entangled inside the plastic bags, which leads to the death of these creatures. Moreover, this also indirectly has an adverse effect on human health because of the food web.…

    • 883 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Plastic Pollution

    • 1491 Words
    • 6 Pages

    These plastics things in Kari O'Connor’s research (October 31, 2011) believed that “Different kinds of plastic can degrade at different times, but the average time for a plastic bottle to completely degrade is at least 450 years. It can even take some bottles 1000 years to biodegrade “ ,Each year ,according to Corrine Henn February 5, 2017 shows that we now consuming “ Upwards of 300 MILLION tons of plastic are consumed each year” ,also in her research “According to a study from Plymouth University, plastic pollution affects at least 700 marine species, while some estimates suggest that at least 100 million marine mammals are killed each year from plastic pollution”. It is agree that there are high number of marine animals and birds die from ingesting and choking on plastic for example sea turtle “mistake plastic waste for a viable food source, sometimes causing blockages in their digestive system” or seabirds , she claims that Plastic pollution leads to the deaths of millions of marine bird species each year. Arguably more so than other birds, the Laysan albatross has been deeply impacted by plastic debris through their hunting techniques. When the albatross dives into the ocean to catch fish, squid or other food they use their beak to skim the surface, picking up plastic along the…

    • 1491 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays