Everyone loves turtles, especially baby turtles. However, humans do more harm than good to them. Pollution is killing sea animals, especially turtles! Things such as straws, plastic bags, fishing lines, and more have severely affected the turtle population. Within the Keys, there are green turtles, loggerhead turtles, and more common species. Each of these species comes to land to lay their eggs. However, there is so much pollution due to storms and whatnot that there’s not enough room for these turtles to lay their eggs. In fact, there is so much pollution that it is invading their whole ecosystem.
Florida is known for its storms. However, they have not set up anything in the keys to avoiding trash and street debris from flowing into the marine ecosystem. Today, during our beach clean up, there were dozens of bottles, bottle caps, buckets, and containers of sorts. This because not only is filled with trash but its also a nesting ground for turtles. Having this pollution there affect the turtles. Plastic can get wrapped around and caught on their fins, shell, or head, and this could be fatal. Hatchlings can also get injured. Just image your trash killing a baby turtle, its awful. As for the water, we found plastic bags and buckets floating. This is very dangerous; plastic bags are easily confused as jellyfish, therefore a turtle can swallow this and never digest it properly, leaving the turtle thinking it's full and later dying of malnutrition.
While physical trash is a significant issue, I also noticed other things around the area that were harmful. For instance, there was a boater nearby. While they had to be at least 40 feet away from the shoreline, these boats can kill turtles with their propellers. There were also many street lights (which I assume to go on at night). This is light pollution; baby turtles are supposed to follow the moonlight into the water. However, this light will confuse them, and they can end up walking towards the street and getting killed.
Florida is a great tourist destination and a great place to live; however, two things need to happen. The ban of one-use items and for red lights and no humans allowed near turtle nesting grounds. If these rules are put into place and are highly enforced, the Florida Keys will become even more beautiful.
I completely agree that, especially tourist destinations, need to have stricter laws that protect the wildlife that lives there. There needs to be more of a push to stop single-use plastics, such as straws and plastic bags, since the amount of people in that small area/island is very large, causing a higher level of pollution.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't believe how much trash had washed up on shore, its awful how humans are letting the environment get to this point. The amount of trash we recovered in an hour is insane to think of.
ReplyDeleteI agree that coastal cities need to have many more laws, regulations, stricter enforcement, as well as much harsher penalties for companies and individuals that have been found guilty of breaking such laws. But to take that a step further i think we should have stricter laws for the entire country for plastic use, and hopefully set some global standards for single use plastics and plastic use as a whole. While i was in the hospital i couldn't believe how much single use plastic that they had used just in my room during a single day, not to mention the entire hospitals overall use of plastic.
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