Whales eat 2,718 shower combs a day!
What a diet!
Turns out whales are eating up to 10 million microparticles of plastic in a day. Thats the equivalent of 43.5kg or 2,718 shower combs. That’s rubbish!
It’s all due to their feeding habits: “[Researchers] found the whales predominantly feed 50 to 250 meters below the surface, a depth that coincides with the highest concentrations of microplastic in the open ocean. The planet’s biggest creature – the blue whale – ingests the most plastic, at an estimated 10 million pieces per day as it feeds almost exclusively on shrimplike animals called krill.”
The problem is that plastic doesn’t really ‘break down’ in the environment. It ‘breaks up’ into tinier and tinier pieces called microplastics. This is then incorporated into the whales diet because ‘The krill eat the plastic, and then the whale eats the krill’.
Just one more reason to phase out our massive dependence on plastic, our over consumption of products using single use plastic, and our terrible system of make-to-waste.
Learn more
news.stanford.edu/2022/11/01/whales-eat-colossal-amounts-microplastics