A quirky look at wildlife. To be taken with a pinch of
salt, but with more than a grain of truth!

Sorting through some old paperwork last week I came across two old
news cuttings, which set me thinking. This column is entitled
'Whacky Wildlife World' and these cuttings confirmed it, but not in a
funny sense. I had all but forgotten about the news articles but both
brought home forcefully the fact that perhaps the one thing in this
crazy world that SHOULD unite us all is the environment. What happens
to it, and in it, affects every single one of us whether we like it or
not. Use of a simple plastic carrier bag and the repercussions is a
case in point, but more of that later.

There was much hilarity when the first story broke in 1990 and 61,280
(some reports said 80,000) indestructible plastic shoes were
shipwrecked off the coast of Alaska. Of the £70 Nike shoes, one
turned up on Queen Charlotte Island, British Columbia and another 500
miles south in Oregon. In 1994 about a 1,000 had been recovered.
Unfortunately Nike don't tie the laces together, so finding a pair
would be considered extremely lucky! Swop Shops were set up for
people to make up pairs. Truth is surely stranger than fiction. Since
then tracking the shoes has helped scientists plot weather forecasts
and track and forecast the route of oil slicks and sewage movements.
Too much information you might think - yuk! - but it matters,
especially if you live in a coastal area. Strange that such an
accident should give scientists the opportunity to track the ocean
currents of the North Pacific more accurately. In December 2002 yet
another 33,000 trainers ended up in the sea off California and headed
for Alaska!

The second story caused even greater amusement when 29,000 bath toys -
yellow plastic ducks, blue turtles, red beavers and green frogs
'escaped' from about a dozen 40ft containers. These were washed off
the deck of a container ship travelling from Hong Kong to Tacoma,
Washington. This was on the 10th January 1992 in a huge storm near the
International Date Line bisecting the Pacific Ocean. It was 10 months
before the story got out when in Sitka, Alaska residents began finding
huge numbers of these plastic toys washed up on beaches. The toys had
travelled 4,500 miles already. They were in plastic bags and, after
24 hours in salt water, the bags split and so the ducks etc 'hatched'.
Nothing has been said since of those billowing plastic bags but
plenty has been written about the ducks etc. Eventually others turned
up in Hawaii, whilst more were carried through the Bering Strait,
between Alaska and Siberia then in to the Arctic Ocean. Scientists
calculated they would float around the North Pole, past Greenland, to
the Atlantic coasts of North America to British and Irish shores. It
was forecast that they would arrive in the North Sea heading for
London and Oslo between 2000 and 2005. A plastic frog was found in
Scotland in 2003 and many more have been found scattered around the
world.

Comical though it was, and useful to science in the long run, there is
a serious and worrying consequence to such accidents. Nike are to be
congratulated on being one of the few companies that admits the loss
of cargoes at sea but many do not. Comparing the Duck map with the
Shoe map helped scientists to learn more about ocean currents, so
something good did come from this accidental litter, but material not
recovered will disintegrate eventually and add to the poisonous tons
of plastic in the oceans.

The tonnage of man-made litter filling our seas is beyond belief.
Containers go overboard at the rate of thousands a year. A container
similar to the shoe and duck containers almost wrecked Ellen
MacArthur's yacht Kingfisher in 2001 in mid Atlantic. As dangerous if
not more so than icebergs. Much of the flotsam and jetsam of modern
life, often coming from America, ends up in Cornwall. Some are
accidental spillages. Much more is deliberately dumped in the sea,
which seems to be regarded as a huge waste disposal unit in which
anything can be tipped, on the basis 'out of sight, out of mind.'

What effect does this have on wildlife? Well, in one instance,
container loads of plastic shopping/carrier bags lost in the sea
looked like jellyfish to Sea Turtles, Sting Rays and other jellyfish
eaters who ate them and subsequently choked to death. Albatrosses and
many other pelagic (open water) seabirds ingest all types of plastic
waste thinking it is food. They even feed this rubbish to their
chicks! Consequently they feel full, but are actually starving. A
gruesome, cruel way to die. Every year thousands of dead seabirds wash
up on beaches, nothing but skin and bone with their stomachs filled
with every imaginable kind of plastic waste.

One recorded case found on The Washington coast of the US, was of a
Northern Fulmar. It had 59 pieces of plastic in its gut including a
broken toy hockey stick, turquoise chips, a red screw-on cap filled
with granules - nurdles - raw industrial pellets the size of an 'o' -
the raw material for all other plastics. Other things found in such
birds include cigarette lighters, bottle caps and hundreds of other
pieces of plastic, some of which could have been in the sea for nearly
fifty years. Like Albatross and other pelagic seabirds, Fulmars spend
their whole lives out in the ocean. There is huge competition for food
so they grab anything that looks like food to eat or take back to
youngsters.

A report as recently as June of this year tells of plastic rubbish
from as far away as Japan and Brazil washing up on a remote Scottish
beach. The St Kilda archipelago in the Outer Hebrides is a World
Heritage site and home to a million seabirds. A recent collection by
staff of The National Trust of Scotland revealed discarded plastic
containers that once held Brazilian mustard, Japanese detergent, Dutch
yoghurt and French shower gel.

Scientific research has revealed that in the oceans there is more than
six pounds of plastic for every pound of zooplankton. Plastic breaks
down into tiny particles. Plastic particles become toxic because
they attract and absorb chemicals such as DDT and PCB up to one
million times the normal ocean background levels. Zooplankton is near
the bottom of the food chain, so these chemicals work their way up
from the tiniest organisms to Orcas and Polar Bears. The 'body
burden' of these and other chemicals increases in all sea creatures,
and does not bode well for humans.

It seems that from time to time Nature must show us her power with
earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, fire, floods
and winds etc. She reminds us that we are not the masters of all we
survey, but the servants and if we do not mend our ways we will suffer
serious consequences.

Now and again Mother Nature also shows a sense of humour, as you will
see, which perhaps sends a more subtle message underlining the power
of nature which should be heeded.

It is not just the sea which transports strange things to strange
places. Wind, too, can do strange things. 'It's raining cats and dogs'
is an age old saying and there are a number of theories as to the
origins of the saying. However, there are other events proven and
documented involving other creatures being carried in freak storms and
deposited many miles away.

The most common creatures dropping in unexpectedly appear to be frogs,
real this time not plastic, which are believed to be lifted from ponds
or lakes etc in storm conditions and deposited elsewhere, much to the
amazement of the recipients! A stranger happening came in 1956 in the
UK when Bristol residents were reminded of the song 'Pennies from
Heaven'. A deluge of pennies and halfpennies fell for over two
minutes. No one has ever found out how much money landed, or where it
came from, but there were no complaints from the locals!

Fish fell on London in 1984 and six large Flounders, still alive, were
found in the streets. In the same year, starfish dropped in on North
Yorkshire. A fish fall in India was recorded in which more than ten
people picked up fish weighing up to eight pounds! A windfall indeed.

In the 1800s massive falls of ice from an unknown source fell on
Scotland. A similar fall in 1973 was thought to have come from
aeroplanes, but the airport stated that no planes had been in the area
at the time. Scotch with ice anyone? Real frogs, too, fell on Scotland
in 1995. In March 1998 very tiny frogs fell on Croydon and in
February of the same year sand from the Sahara Desert was blown
thousands of miles to Britain.

There have been many reports of unexplained 'deliveries' of many
creatures - ants, beetle larvae, crabs, crayfish, eels, fish, flowers,
frogs, jellyfish, lizards, snails, snakes, spiders, even turtles, not
to mention numerous inanimate objects and materials. Hurricanes and
tsunamis carry ships, houses and people and deposit them elsewhere. No
way can we fight against such power, so perhaps we should respect it,
and try to work with it.

A Tax on Carrier Bags - 3p a bag, even 10p a bag - does perhaps
reduce the number sold but in view of the damage plastic causes to the
environment and wildlife, for many many years, shouldn't we be
thinking about phasing them out altogether along with many other
'disposable' products unheard of years ago?

I am as guilty as the next person of using plastic carrier bags,
putting up with excessive packaging and using disposable plastic
items, but the vision of those poor pelagic birds, dying in their
thousands with a bellyful of plastic litter is making me think very
seriously about my shopping habits.

To find out more about ocean pollution, visit the site of the
pressure group Surfers Against
Sewage.

Websailor's Wacky Wildlife
World Archive

Websailor

13.07.06 Front Page

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