Olive Ridley sea turtle hatchlings inside a plastic water basin before being released at a beach in Morong in the Bataan province of the Philippines, on January 7, 2016.
Credit: Noel Celis/AFP
Wallace Nichols, a marine biologist who has been studying sea turtles and plastic pollution in the oceans for nearly 25 years, is worried.
“It used to be that when we found a rare piece of plastic on a nesting beach or tangled around a turtle, we’d pick it up or remove it and all would be right in the world again,” he told Truthout. “But the problem steadily and steeply worsened to the point that now we can spend all day endeavoring to clean up the plastic in and on the same beaches, come back the next day and start all over again. Nearly all turtle necropsies produce internal plastics.”
Nichols, who is also a senior fellow at the Center for the Blue Economyand author of Blue Mind, says he used to try to estimate how many sea turtles were impacted […]
