Orbit and Alcoholic: Some Sad Story

Some of us may never know how trash can devastate the marine world and if we chose to remain indifferent and irresponsible in managing solid waste, we are all in great peril.  Despite all the advocacy efforts in the communities still many atrocities are happening causing more damage to the environment on surface or in the depths.

My recent visit to The Bone Collector Museum revealed disheartening discoveries on the fate of marine creatures – death of harmless creatures, the culprit may not even knew the consequence of his or her one big mistake which he or she might  not even remember.

The skeletons of various marine life were good educational showcase for everyone, but taking a closer look of the causes of their death especially the bigger species, in my opinion was too ridiculous. One of the collection is a sperm whale skeleton, its dead body  was found in Davao Oriental waters, inside her belly  were collection of trashes – a jackstone ball, hair clip, sachet wrapper, pentel pen cap, plastic bottle cap and more – it died slowly due to debris in its digestive system.

A Pygmy Sperm Whale which they called Orbit – happy and content with abundant food in the waters but someone somewhere threw an orbit chewing gum bottle on ground or in the ocean, which the whale mistakenly thought as food. It went into its intestines blocking it causing him to starve to death combined with dehydration. Or Alcoholic – a False Killer Whale – it was an alcohol plastic bottle that killed her.  Someone Carelessly discarded the top of an alcohol bottle, it made its way to the ocean where it was eaten with the rest of her food.  He starved to death slowly with the plastic blocking her intestines.

These were just few of terrible stories that are happening in our communities, real stories that made me cringe when I heard from a witness while seeing the real trash salvaged from the dead specie.  I suspect that those species we always hear from news that came ashore or float up were sick for these same reasons.  Though I want to believe we are not hopeless yet, we just all need to be conscious of the impacts of our actions and decisions  affecting the environment. We all have the responsibility to preserve and save this planet!