A sea turtle defecates only from plastic – for six days

When a green sea turtle was found on a Sydney beach, it lost a fin and had holes in its shell. The vets took her to Taronga Zoo to provide care for her. She weighed only 127 grams and was judged to be a newborn, writes The guardian.

Staff at Taronga Zoo discovered that despite his injuries and small size, he appeared to be fine, except for his stomach.

– When you defecate, there’s no stool, just pure plastic, six days in a row, veterinary nurse Sarah Malley in Taronga tells the Guardian.

https://twitter.com/tarongazoo/status/1552549525096628225

The plastic pieces were of different colors, Plastic size and configuration. Some were hard, some were sharp, and some had letters written on them that could still be read.

– That’s all some of these little creatures eat. She told The Guardian there’s so much plastic around that they eat it as their first bite of food.

According to veterinary nurse Sarah Malley, who was part of the emergency care team that rescued the baby turtle, she is now healthy and has no problem swimming despite only having three fins.

However, it may take up to a year before the baby turtles are released into the sea again.

Taronga Veterinary Hospital saves up to 80 tortoises a year – many of whom have been injured by fishing nets or fishing hooks and the plastic they ate.

Several states in Australia recently introduced stricter rules against the use of plastic products, the residue of which could end up in the sea and harm animals.

Each year, eleven million tons of plastic end up in oceans and lakes around the world, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. Most of it comes from garbage that flows with rivers and rain, but broken plastic remains are also dumped, for example, from fishing boats. This applies to everything from cigarette filters to disposable packaging or plastic bags. But the oceans are also polluted by billions of microplastics from clothing, legos and tire scrap.

Plastic particles from car tires It is estimated that they make up a quarter of the microplastics in the world’s oceans. Water on Earth is so contaminated with microplastic particles that the average person drinks the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic each week, he writes CNN.

The amount of microplastics in the oceans is expected to quadruple by 2050, the WWF writes in one Relationship from last spring. The United Nations has made a decision to reduce dependence on it plast.