Environmental scientists in the United States have revealed that giant whales (whale whales) eat more than 10 million microplastics a day, along with plankton.
Nature Communications says it poses a particularly high risk to whale health from this plastic waste.
He added that about 300 million tons of plastic waste is added to the world’s sewers and landfills every year, most of which is impervious to microbes and has remained largely unchanged for decades or even hundreds of years. For this reason, ecologists and oceanographers often refer to the last half century as the “plastic age” due to the large amount of micropolymer waste in the waters of the world’s oceans.
Apparently these particles don’t stay in the water for long, because marine and freshwater animals eat them. Therefore, a large part of it can infect the human body when eating fish, shellfish and crustaceans.
A team of ecologists led by Jeremy Goldbogen of Stanford University in the US decided to find out how many of these plastic particles are digested daily by giant whales with their food.
Based on this idea, the researchers monitored how often these whales visited the Pacific and other oceans, where they accumulated large amounts of plastic waste. They also tracked the depth the whales swam and the time they spent searching for food in polluted water.
Overall, this pursuit included around 200 whales, including giant whales, blue whales, and fin whales. The researchers’ calculations showed that these whales usually eat a lot of microplastics. For example, blue whales and fin whales ingest about 10 million microplastics, while humpback whales ingest more than 500,000 microplastics, along with plankton and small fish.
According to the researchers, this indicates the rapid formation of a large mass of plastic in the digestive tract of whales, which can negatively affect their health.
source: tass
Source: Arabic RT
