Rescued turtle who pooped plastic for six days
Taronga Zoo
A tiny turtle who was rescued by the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, pooped plastic for six days.
When he started to defecate, “No feces came out, just pure plastic.”
The WWF estimates half of all marine turtles have eaten plastic.
A tiny turtle who was rescued by the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, pooped plastic for six days.
In a video on the Zoo’s Twitter page, the veterinary nurse Sarah Male explains that the little turtle was rescued from a nearby beach with a back flipper “chomped” off.
Rescued turtle who pooped plastic for six days
Taronga Zoo
But when he started to defecate, “he defecated six days of plastic. No feces came out, just pure plastic,” she said.
“Luck was on his side,” she said, and he has now passed all the plastic in his system.
Male said most injuries they see are caused by ingesting plastics and fishing lines.
—Taronga Zoo (@tarongazoo) July 28, 2022
According to the Taronga Zoo website, the hospital rehabilitates and releases over 80 marine turtles every year.
They also treat other native animals and have released over 50,000 animals back into the wild since they opened in the 1970s.
Humans dump roughly eight million tonnes of plastic into the sea every year, with the WWF saying that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is projected to outweigh fish by 2050.
The WWF also states that 90% of seabirds have plastic in their stomachs, and half of marine turtles have eaten plastic.
A watchdog report by Oceana found that, in 2020, Amazon alone dumped 23.5 million pounds of plastic into the world’s oceans.
At the end of 2021, a non-profit launched called The Ocean Cleanup, an organization dedicated to cleaning our seas from plastics.
Their two-and-a-half-month mission brought back 64,000 pounds of trash, which included a mannequin and a refrigerator.