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OccultHawk · 03-19-2019, 06:35 AM

National Geographic

Quote:

On Saturday, the curators at a natural history museum in Davao City, the Philippines, got a call from the local marine agency: An emaciated-looking whale in the Davao Gulf was vomiting blood, listing badly as it swam, and was very likely going to die shortly. They should come pick up its body.
When Darrell Blatchley, a marine mammal expert and the curator at the D’Bone Collector Museum in Davao City, brought the whale back to the lab to open it up for a necropsy, he found something shocking: over 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of plastic waste jammed into its belly.
“Plastic was just bursting out of its stomach,” he said. “We pulled out the first bag, then the second. By the time we hit 16 rice sacks—on top of the plastic bags, and the snack bags, and big tangles of nylon ropes, you're like—seriously?”
His son, who was attending the necropsy, said “Dad, how did it even live this long?”
The plastic trash was so densely packed into the dead whale's stomach that it felt as “hard and compacted as a baseball,” he said, only many times bigger—more like two dense basketballs of trash, about eight percent of the juvenile beaked whale's total weight. Some of it had been in the stomach so long it had started to calcify.
The curvier beaked whale, a young male about 15 feet long and weighing 1,100 pounds, likely died of starvation and dehydration brought on by the plastic stuffing its belly. Whales absorb water from the food they eat, and there was no sign that any food had made it into its intestines for many days. Its body was destroying itself from the inside: Its stomach acid, unable to break down the plastic waste, had worn holes through its stomach lining instead.

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