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17.05.2021 7:13:18
Texas A&M Professor Craig Wilson said Monarchs number about 141.5 million this year, compared to 300 million last year. more
See full version: The Turtle With A Straw In Its Nose: The Story Behind The Viral Video
Texas A&M Professor Craig Wilson said Monarchs number about 141.5 million this year, compared to 300 million last year. more
Men who have multiple medical conditions and frustrations with healthcare are more likely to turn to the internet for information, a Texas A&M study suggests.
Earlier this year, Texas A&M graduate student Christine Figgener traveled to Costa Rica to study ridley sea turtles for her doctoral dissertation. While examining one male turtle, she and her companions found a long plastic straw lodged in the turtle’s nostril. Her video of the team extracting the straw has received more than 5.5 million views on YouTube. This is the story behind that video.
Critical knowledge gaps on habitat loss in lower-income countries were also revealed by research co-authored by a Texas A&M geographer. more
"This fork, like the straw, was probably eaten by the turtle. When she tried to regurgitate it, the fork did not pass out of her mouth but went out her nose," Robinson said in a Facebook post. [links]
"Shortly afterward, the turtle began to move back to the ocean,"Robinson wrote, "Appearing healthy and active, we watched her as she entered the waves and swam away." here
For this sea turtle, someone's fork would up in a place it never should have -- its nostril. But the Olive Ridley turtle was lucky enough to find itself in the hands of some capable researchers on a beach in Costa Rica.
Roughly 8 million metric tons of plastic trash end up in our oceans every year, according to a study published in Science earlier this year. If we don't reduce the amount of plastic waste we create, that number will double to 17.5 metric tons per year by 2025.
You better think twice next time you carelessly toss your plastic utensils after lunch -- you never know where they could end up.
"As I tested how firmly the object was lodged in its nose; it was clear that it was lodged into her nose very deeply," Nathan Robinson, who works with the sea turtle conservation organization Leatherback Trust, wrote in a blog post. In the video below -- which is not for the squeamish -- Robinson and his team remove the fork from the turtle's nose.
This story is part of Planet or Plastic?—our multiyear effort to raise awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your pledge.
In a cringe-inducing video that’s gone viral, a team of scientists spent nearly ten minutes pulling a plastic straw from the nostril of an olive ridley sea turtle.
At first, “it looked like a worm,” says Christine Figgener, a sea turtle expert at Texas A&M University in College Station who helped the injured reptile off the coast of Costa Rica.
Figgener and colleagues were collecting data on sea turtle mating when they noticed something in the nose of a 77-pound (35-kilogram) male.
After team members extracted a couple of centimetres of the object with pliers and snipped off a sample, they discovered that the wrinkled, brownish object was a plasticdrinking straw.
Assured it wasn’t a parasite that might have been attached to part of the turtle’s brain, the researchers decided to remove the entire four-inch (ten-centimetre) straw.
The team felt it was better to remove the straw immediately since they were hours away from a veterinarian—and there was no guarantee the vet would know how to deal with a sea turtle. (Watch injured sea turtles get healthy in rehab.)
“We couldn’t believe what we had just pulled out of that turtle,” says Figgener.
AN OCEAN OF PLASTIC
She’s been campaigning against plastic straws for years, but never expected to find one lodged up a sea turtle’s nose. The animal looked like it was having some trouble breathing since the straw took up an entire nostril.
Usually, trash such as plastic bags and even toothbrushes end up in a sea turtle’s stomach, she says. It’s also quite common to see fishing hooks embedded in a turtle’s mouth or flipper, Figgener adds.
She’s not sure how the straw ended up in the male’s nose, but the sea turtle expert thinks it could have swallowed the straw at some point, gagged on it, and then tried to throw it back up.
“Olive ridleys feed on crustaceans, especially on the seabed,” Figgener says, so the turtle might have slurped up the straw along with its meal.
The passageways for food and air are connected in a turtle just like they are in people. That’s why some of the material we throw up can come out of our nose, Figgener says. It’s possible the straw could have ended up in the wrong passageway and gotten lodged in the reptile’s nostril.
The team disinfected the sea turtle’s nose and watched it to make sure it seemed healthy before releasing it back into the ocean.
Straws are useless, Figgener says, and contribute to the 5.25 trillion pieces of marine trash that have ended up in the ocean, according to a January report.
People can drink out of a more
The following video shows how humans are destroying the environment and harming nature with their reckless behavior. Knowingly or unknowingly, we have been polluting our planet. Our waste and garbage end up as far as middle of the ocean and it is extremely damaging to marine life. Just look at the following clip if you need any further proof. It features the rescue of a sea turtle and the heart-breaking footage just might bring you to tears.
A research team found this male sea turtle during one their in-water research trips to Costa Rica. They thought it was infected by a parasitic worm at first, but they later realized what the thing in his nostril really was. They found out that the poor thing actually had a 10 to 12 cm plastic straw lodged in him! Just imagine one being stuck inside your nose! How they took it out is extremely difficult to watch. Wait till you check it out for yourself!
This research team wants to spread a simple message: “say no to plastic straws and any kind of one-time use plastic item”. When are we going to stop destroying what’s around us? Once its too late, we can never go back. We need to think about the generations that are going to come after us, and work to conserve our planet as fast as possible. more