Whale eats 40kg of plastic, dies

A starving whale with 40kg of plastic in its stomach has died after being washed ashore in the Philippines, activists said Monday, calling it one of the worst cases of trash poisoning they have seen.

Environmental groups have tagged the Philippines as one of the world’s biggest singleuse plastic ocean polluters.

The pollution, also widespread in other southeast Asian nations, regularly kills wildlife such as whales and turtles that ingest the plastic waste.

A Cuvier’s beaked whale died at the weekend in the southern province of Compostela Valley where it had been stranded a day earlier, the region’s fisheries bureau said.

The agency and an environmental group performed a necropsy on the whale and found 40kg of plastic, including grocery bags and rice sacks.

The whale died from starvation and was unable to eat because of the trash filling its stomach, Darrell Blatchley, director of D’ Bone Collector Museum, which helped conduct the examination, said.

“It’s very disgusting and heartbreaking,” he said.

“We’ve done necropsies on 61 dolphins and whales in the last 10 years and this is one of the biggest [amounts of plastic] we have seen.”

The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources said the 4.7m-long whale was stranded in Mabini town on Friday where officials and fishermen tried to release it, only for the mammal to return to the shallow water.

“It could not swim,” a spokesperson said. –