You may think a plastic container looks pretty harmless on a supermarket shelf but if discarded into the ocean and swept-up onto a beach, it is a different story.
This container, found by Sea Shepherd crew as they worked alongside the Dhimurru Rangers cleaning the 14km beach, had trapped and killed a turtle hatchling and crab.
As the plastic crisis sweeps across Australia’s top-end beaches, we are seeing the same story in other places too.
Recently, in the first study of its kind, an IMAS-led research team estimated that around 570 000 hermit crabs have been killed on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean.
The hermit crab study found that piles of plastic pollution on beaches create both a physical barrier and a series of potentially deadly traps for crabs and other marine creatures.
The plastic waste lying around poses a risk of injury to all marine animals and blocks, for example, young turtles from getting to the water.
Animals like hermit crabs also crawl into the containers and cannot find their way out.
Unfortunately, the decaying smell of the dead conspecifics often attracts other animals, which then faces the same fate.
The actually “harmless” container thus triggers an insidious and deadly chain reaction.
Whether on the coast, in the city or in the country, you can find garbage everywhere.
Cans, balloon cords, bottles and and and … – if it’s lying around, take it with you, you could possibly save a life with it.
https://www.imas.utas.edu.au/news/news-items/half-a-million-crabs-killed-by-plastic-debris-on-remote-islands
And I mean…Of course, we will also clean up the garbage that threatens the lives of our flatmates, the animals.
It will be us again, who else?
We are the ones who save animals wherever they can be found.
We are the ones who are always on duty to correct fatal mistakes made by idiots, irresponsible people, or animal haters.
Like a concrete slab, this cruel reality presses us every day and forces us to work for abandoned, injured, neglected animals. And that’s a tough job!
We correct malice, injustice, violence; we cannot do otherwise, our own morals dictate that.
But if we see and feel the advancing catastrophe of our planet every day, which is taking place due to the indifference of the meat eaters, the molesters of nature, the exploiters of natural resources and animals, then we could say that Corona lasted far too short.
Our hope champion was too slow and too weak.
This Corona was a weakling.
My best regards to all, Venus