IF THE OCEAN DIES

Save the turtles! Stop buying plastic straws! This took over the world by storm in 2017, but was it pushed to us the people, to cover up fisher men and the luring dangers of overfishing. When 0.3 percent of the “trash” in our oceans comes from plastic straws specifically. So where does the rest come from? Well, over 60 percent is fishing gear. Is the trash killing everything in the ocean or is it the fishing itself that’s gotten out of control? Before we can get into that you’d have to understand “trophic cascade”” which is when one species goes extinct, others will follow, and others are affected. A lot of people don’t realize when dolphins and whales go up to the surface to “breathe” they are fertilizing plants in the ocean called phytoplankton, which then absorbs four times the amount of carbon dioxide than the amazon rain forest does alone. Generating up to 80% of our oxygen, so besides the fact that relentlessly hunting these animals is cruel… you are killing your planet, as well as yourselves, and future generations. So just to do a re-cap. if dolphins and whales die, the ocean dies, and if the ocean dies, well so do we. Our trash in the ocean now reaches every corner of it, with our biggest waste land in the great pacific, “the garbage patch” reaching a whopping 1.6 million square kilometers. Just to give you an idea, one garbage TRUCK load is dumped into our oceans every minute, and all these plastic materials we dump into our oceans break down to microplastics and are absorbed by the marine life that we feed ourselves. Speaking of feeding ourselves, do you eat fish and other seafood products? Maybe the statement about you eating plastic when you bite your King Mackerel might do it for you but if not, just know that 2.7 trillion fish died for you to have that 1. And that’s 2.7 trillion every year. Which may make 73 million sharks killed every year sound small but not when you know that these sharks are being killed just for their fins a delicacy, in Japan, called fin soup. A soup with no real flavor and no nutritional value at all. The fins that don’t make it to the soup get sold in shops as souvenirs. You may not care for good ole’ Jaws that much but sharks are just as important as whales and dolphins. When sharks disappear altogether, less bigger fish are eaten, meaning more smaller fish are eaten, causing an incline on algae in coral reefs. Algae at high levels will suffocate coral reefs and then suffocate the ocean. So why do we focus on straws then? Why are huge “non-profit” organizations talking about the plastic straws, saving baby ducks from oil spills, and not telling the masses of the dangers of over-fishing? That would be because In 2016 alone, the commercial fishing and seafood industries supported nearly 1.7 million jobs and generated $212 billion in the US, in sales, alone. But by 2050, our oceans will be alone.