#ocean garbage

Greg Dunlop, BBC, 15 May 2017

An uninhabited island in the South Pacific is littered with the highest density of plastic waste anywhere in the world, according to a study.

Henderson Island, part of the UK’s Pitcairn Islands group, has an estimated 37.7 million pieces of debris on its beaches.

The island is near the centre of an ocean current, meaning it collects much rubbish from boats and South America.

Researchers hope people will “rethink their relationship with plastic”.

The joint Australian and British study said the rubbish amounted to 671 items per square metre and a total of 17 tonnes.

“A lot of the items on Henderson Island are what we wrongly refer to as disposable or single-use,” said Dr Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania.

“Almost every island in the world and almost every species in the ocean is now being shown to be impacted one way or another by our waste,” she said.

From Fort Morgan Share the Beach Facebook page: “This Kemps Ridley which in on the endangered list was found this morning with this chair around it’s neck. This makes me so mad. How many hundreds of times do we have to ask people to pick their stuff up? It should just be common decency. I think I am going to print this out and carry it with me next time I have to ask.”

Excerpt:

An extremely endangered sea turtle was found dead on a Fort Morgan, Alabama beach Saturday, strangled by an abandoned beach chair, the Miami Herald reported Sunday.

The turtle's death was documented by a series of Facebook posts by the Fort Morgan branch of Alabama sea turtle conservation group Share the Beach.

The posts identified the turtle as a Kemp's ridley turtle, which are the smallest species of sea turtle, according to the Miami Herald, and also the most endangered, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

They typically nest in Texas and Mexico but have been found in the Gulf, WPMI reported.

Kemp's ridley sea turtles have been listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) as endangered speciessince 1970, and the greatest threat to the species is human activity, according to the Miami Daily Herald.

"We did it, turtles will not encounter chairs if it were not for us," Dauphin Island resident and Share the Beach volunteer Richard Brewer told Fox10 News. "Heartbreaking. Truly heartbreaking."

Brewer said that he had a pile of nets, ropes and refrigerator tanks in his yard that he and his daughter had collected from beaches on Dauphin Island this season.

"We had great news this morning, we believe that we have the first Kemp's ridley nest ever found on Dauphin Island, to find out that we had a mature female Kemp's that just died because of something that could have been prevented is tragic," Brewer told Fox10 News.

Here’s what a kemp’s ridley turtle looks like when it isn’t choking on a beach chair:

Isn’t this photo sad? Even the tiniest human thing can disrupt things in unanticipated (but totally anticipatable) ways.

A small sea horse grabs onto garbage in Indonesia. (Justin Hofman/Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Excerpt:

The powerful and poignant image shows a tiny sea horse holding tightly onto a pink, plastic cotton swab in blue-green waters around Indonesia.

California nature photographer Justin Hofman snapped the picture late last year off the coast of Sumbawa, an Indonesian island in the Lesser Sunda Islands chain. The 33-year-old, from Monterey, Calif., said a colleague pointed out the pocket-size sea creature, which he estimated to be about 1.5 inches tall — so small, in fact, that Hofman said he almost didn't reach for his camera.

“The wind started to pick up and the sea horse started to drift. It first grabbed onto a piece of sea grass,” Hofman said Thursday in a phone interview.

Hofman started shooting.

“Eventually more and more trash and debris started to move through,” he said, adding that the critter lost its grip, then latched onto a white, wispy piece of a plastic bag. “The next thing it grabbed was a Q-Tip.”

From The Guardian:

Excerpt:

Recently, an international team of scientists sponsored by Museums Victoria and a government research organization spent a month trawling the ocean floor off the Aussie Coast trying to figure out what lives down there — and how they've adapted to survive.

For scientists, the finds are beginning to shed light on the dramatic evolution of creatures in extreme environments. They've possibly identified a new fish and found animals living at lower depths than recorded.

For the rest of us, the photos of the findings offer something different: seawater-scented nightmare fuel.

The scientists pulled up more than a thousand sea creatures, which will be studied and catalogued in the months to come, then gaped at by Australian schoolchildren.

Japanese Scientists Use High-Res Mapping To Tackle Plastic Pollution

From the team at CFACT ~

To be sure, plastic is an important part of our daily lives. Yet when that plastic gets tossed into the ocean, it can become an environmental menace.

Recent studies indicate that upwards of 0.27 million tons of plastic are adrift on our oceans. This is not good news for marine life which can consume it or get tangled in it.

Consequently, some have sought to ban the use of…