Week 10: Specific Species Impacted By Plastic Pollution (How Are They Impacted?)

Welcome back to my blog.

This week I’m highlighting a few species that are directly impacted by plastic pollution. Some species include sea turtles, whales, and seals. These species are impacted by ways such as entanglement, consumption, and digestion. For example, sea turtles will perceive plastic bags as jellyfish which will cause a digestive problem for the turtle or the turtle getting caught in the bag. Another way that turtles are harmed is through fishing nets when they try to go to the surface. When ascending turtles can get their fins entangled in the net preventing them from being able to swim in the direction they want or being able to make it to the surface to breathe. The same goes for seals with entanglement, seals are caught in many objects other than just nets. This prevents them from moving efficiently to get predators, as well as prevent them from being able to breathe properly. Whales on the other hand are primarily affected through digestion, when eating food such as krill and plankton, whales are actually eating some plastic along with their food due to how small the plastic can get. Normally you would believe that these species would have some food properly consumed along with accidentally eating plastic, but it actually causes starvation in the creature’s body eventually causing death and sooner or worse extinction for a species. Though there are already acts that are working to prevent plastic in the ocean, it’s not working fast enough in order to reduce the amount of plastic consumed by creatures in the ocean. And if you think this is only affecting sea creatures, you’re wrong. If you eat any type of seafood, then you are automatically eating some type of plastic.

Until next week.