What’s in Our Seas

Today’s blog is about ecology and what is in our seas and on our beaches, as well as all over the place on land. Why you might ask, well if you have ever seen photos of tangled seals, dolphins, turtles, fish and all the other poor creatures in our seas you’d know why.

The above photo isn’t a local one, but we’ve got plenty that are. This poor fish is being slowly throttled as it grows, by an elastic hairband.

It just gets me why people are so happy to discard their rubbish where they stand instead of finding a litter bin or taking their rubbish home. For example, I saw a story in the paper about people just throwing away face masks wherever they want instead of taking them home. After all, it’s not as though they weigh a ton is it. Take your own germs home instead of leaving them for others to pick up.

What’s in Our Seas

Almost 30% of beaches have had face masks and rubber gloves on them, along with the usual stack of polystyrene, caps and bottle lids, cigarettes and plastic string. All ready to go into the sea and pollute it for the creatures who call it home.

The trouble is that sea creatures see masks, plastic bags and the rest as prey. They eat and fill their stomachs with them and as they can’t be broken down, it’s often fatal. Animals also get their faces trapped in the straps of the masks which can again prove fatal as it stops them from hunting and feeding.

Volunteers are continually picking up all the masks and gloves from beaches. Although why there are so many dumped on the beaches is a mystery to me. Surely people don’t deliberately make their way to a beach to do the deed, nor would many people be wearing masks so close to the sea. So I’m a bit puzzled by the need to throw them on the beach.

This is What’s in Our Seas

Just in case you’re interested, did you know that as much as 13 million tonnes of plastic goes into the oceans every year? Now I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a staggering amount of plastic by anyone’s standards. It’s dreadful for the creatures that live in the sea who are being poisoned and starved by all this plastic going into their stomachs.

Last week, a friend of ours and her husband were litter picking on the beach in front of us, when they came across an absolute load of tiny bits of shredded plastic. Intrigued, Jane went across to them to see what they had found.

She brought a sample back, along with some of the sand they were embedded in. They were very, very small bits of plastic, absolutely shredded. You could see different colours on them and a lot of it seemed white. Jane emailed the pictures to the council – the fragments stretched in a tidal line all along our beach for a long way, making a stack of pollution. The sample has gone off to the Environment Agency, as, to be frank, it shouldn’t be there at all.

Sieving a Sample

Obviously the plastic sample included the sand it was stuck on, and my and was it small. Kevin, Jane and I were standing in the kitchen wondering how we could separate the sand away from the plastic. Inventor Kevin said it wanted straining. How you did that we didn’t know, because they were all trapped in the sand. Our inventor applied his physics knowledge and said that if we put it in water it would float to the top and separate from the sand.

Sceptical Chrissie and Jane looked puzzled at him. So he got a spoon and began splashing it over the sand and water mixture and it worked, much to our amazement. So, there we were like little sand boys and girls, tipping and pouring, to end up with a saucer of tiny bits of plastic.

Of course we had a good laugh at ourselves as we played about in the  mixture. But eventually even we were surprised at the percentage of plastic to sand – it was more than we thought.

Sadly, the sand had held loads of the stuff which of course would go back into the sea on the next tide to be eaten by hungry fish and animals. The council have collected it so it will be interesting to see what they make of it. But as she said it shouldn’t be there and certainly not such a lot of it.

• Read the full article about the plastic fragments, with lots of photo and video.

Who’s Responsible?

It would be nice to know who’s contaminated the sea. It’s time that whoever is responsible for dumping in the sea is brought to task for what they do.

We’ll just have to wait and see although I’m not holding my breath!!!