alexjade333
Registered: November 2014
City/Town/Province: Westlake Village
Posts: 1
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When I arrived on the beach I was excited to spend a few hours with friends in a scenic location to help the environment. While many people can’t grasp the full effect their actions have on the wild life in the ocean, I understood the importance of keeping trash and debris out of the ocean. I was given a pamphlet where I was able to mark down the type of and quantity of trash I would gather that day. The categories included: glass, plastic, bottles, and debris (such as cigarette buds). The “Heal the Bay” organization then uses this information in legal courts to try and get legislation created. They hope to create stricter laws against littering and have larger fines for littering. I learned that every year at least 267 marine species (seabirds, turtles, whales and dolphins) are affected by plastic each year. For example, cetaceans (whales, porpoises, and dolphins) see inflated floating plastic bags, mistake them for jellyfish, ingest them, and then die from suffocation. An estimated 100,000 marine animals die each year from suffocating on bags. I also learned Dolphins become entangled in discarded six-pack carrier rings which can cause them to starve or suffocate. To prevent this in the future, people should be educated about this and should cut up these plastic rings. Lastly, I learned that plastic contains toxic chemicals which leach into the ocean poisoning vegetation and also act as a sponge which absorbs other heavy metals from ocean and further pollutes. Plastic is a source of dioxin (a persistent environmental toxin and endocrine disrupter that causes gender mutations) and other pollutants that are disrupting habitats and polluting the food chain. Cleaning the beach affected the environment in a positive way. When beach visitors leave their plastic bags from chips, sandwiches, and snacks, these items drift out on to the shore and eventually end up deep in the ocean in the high seas, ocean areas that are beyond any country’s legal jurisdiction (like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean formed by a circular ocean current), which is why it is essential to prevent the spread of trash before it gets out so far. They also end up in the ocean’s euphotic zone (sunlight zone is the depth of the water in a lake or ocean that is exposed to sufficient sunlight for photosynthesis to occur) which blocks sunlight needed by the coral, plankton and algae under the surface. Autotrophs such as these produce their own nutrients. If these are threatened, all the marine life that consumes algae/plankton won’t food while larger predators such as tuna, sharks, and whales will get less food. The entire food web is affected by the littering of plastic trash in the ocean. Some solutions would include hiring beach monitoring rangers to make sure people properly dispose of trash, including color coded trash bins on the beach so people can easily distinguish where to dispose of their recyclable goods, and having expensive fines for littering.
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