If you were to ask a gray whale what it eats, it will tell you this: it feeds off the bottom, mouthing in huge amounts of mud, then literally pressing all of what it just mouthed through its baleen plates. The baleen acts like a giant screen to catch all the mollusks, algae and other small animals and nutrients, but also allows the mud to be blown out and discarded back into the ocean. It's actually a very efficient process.
Because gray whales are bottom feeders, they find the most plentiful amounts of food in sun-drenched coastal waters, which is a haven for bottom dwelling critters. So, they travel up and down the Pacific and other coastlines, siphoning mud through their baleen for food, and any gray whale will tell you, that’s how they eat.
The problem with this way of eating is humans. Gray whales have been eating this exact same way for millions of years, but in only the past 50 years or so, humans have been discarding non-biodegradable garbage into the oceans. Unfortunately, most of it ends up off shore and directly into the feeding areas of the gray whale.
We know this as a fact because at least one gray washed up dead on a beach in West Seattle, and a great deal of trash was found in its stomach. The list includes a pair of sweatpants, duct tape, 20 plastic bags, surgical gloves and even a golf ball among other things! Someone needs to write a book about this and call it the Pacific Ocean Bottom Feeder Diet. Guaranteed to kill or cure, with double your money back if you survive!
There are already a couple of posted articles on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch here on B.A.—also known as Gilligan's Island—and they are must reads if you want to find out a little bit about what is floating around out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But closer to home, garbage that doesn’t float is getting eaten by gray whales and other marine animals. Skeletal bird remains have been found with their stomach areas full of plastic items like bottle caps and other yummy plastic goodies. Sea turtles are known to consume floating plastic bags because they think they are jelly fish. Unless they choke to death first, after a bout of severe indigestion from eating a plastic bag, the turtle dies anyway!
It is estimated that over 100 million marine animals die each year from ingested garbage alone, and no one is to blame except the human race. Although there is no evidence that eating garbage caused the death of the gray whale written about above, the fact remains that human waste is turning up in the last great fully functioning ecosystem on our planet, the worlds oceans.
All is not doom and gloom however. In the United States, at least, an ocean dumping ban act has been in place since 1988, and by 1991, virtually all industrial waste was outlawed from being dumped in the ocean. So in theory, ocean feeding will get better for gray whales as well as every other marine animal. But plastic here is the real killer; it just doesn’t deteriorate very fast, and is going to be a problem for decades to come.
And Because Action speaks louder than words, what can we do about this? Unfortunately, not a whole lot. We can all recycle and make sure that we either get plastics to the correct place or don’t use them at all, and we don’t have to wallop golf balls off of piers into the ocean. But that’s about it, because until all of this junk filters out of the environment one way or another, marine animals are still going to die, and gray whales are still going to have garbage on their bottom-feeding menus, because that’s how they eat.
Source: BecauseAction.com
