Sir David: we have turned our oceans into a toxic soup
New Blue Planet will show danger to marine life of dumped plastic
THE world’s oceans are turning into a toxic soup of industrial waste and plastic, putting humanity at risk.
That is the scale of man’s impact on the planet lain bare by Sir David Attenborough in the final episode of his groundbreaking BBC wildlife documentary Blue Planet II.
Sunday’s episode is to show the horrifying death of an albatross whose gut is punctured by a plastic toothpick, as well as potentially lethal polythene bags and plastic found in a chick’s stomach.
A necropsy performed on a dolphin will show that the young female had high levels of man-made toxins in its tissues, which led to its death.
Dolphins are at the top of the food chain and experts believe that adults ingest so much plastic that their offspring may be contaminated by their own mother’s milk.
Sir David said: “Since its invention some 100 years ago, plastic has become an integral part of our daily lives, but every year some eight million tons of it ends up in the ocean.
“While filming Blue Planet II the crews found plastic in every ocean, even in the most remote locations.
“Once in the ocean plastic breaks down into tiny fragments, micro plastics.
“With industrial chemicals which have drained into the ocean, these form a potentially toxic soup. Industrial pollution and discarding of plastic waste must be tackled for the sake of all life in the ocean. Surely we have a responsibility to care for our planet. The future of humanity and indeed all life on earth, now depends on us.”
The world’s oceans are drowning in human rubbish. More than 300million tons of plastic are produced globally annually, and 10 per cent ends up in the sea. In the worst areas, there are a million pieces of plastic for every square mile and it is estimated there is a 1:2 ratio of plastic to plankton which, left unchecked, will outweigh fish within 35 years.
In the final episode, the filmmakers travelled to South Georgia, a British overseas territory in the Southern Atlantic Ocean that is home to a large albatross colony. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has studied the colony for decades and has noticed rapid declines as increasing amounts of plastic enter the oceans. The birds become entangled in fishing gear and drown or unwittingly feed plastic to their chicks.
Lucy Quinn, of the BAS, said: “It’s only through looking at long-term studies that you get a sense of these creatures, and the albatrosses here have over the past 10 years been in decline.
“Albatrosses have the ability to cough up food they can’t digest and from that we can tell what they’ve been eating. A healthy albatross chick should really be having things like squid, so we find the squid beaks that come out of the pellet and also fish, so we can find fish bones.
“We found a plastic bag and some food packaging. It looks like rice. Luckily for this chick it has managed to get this plastic out of its stomach.”
However, another chick was not so lucky.
“Unfortunately there was a plastic toothpick which had gone through the stomach,” said Miss Quinn. “Something as small as that has managed to kill the bird.”
Sir David said: “For years we thought that the oceans were so vast and the inhabitants so infinitely numerous that nothing we could do could have an effect upon them. But now we know that was wrong. The oceans are under threat now as never before in human history.”
The final episode of Blue Planet II, entitled Our Blue Ocean, airs at 8pm. Viewers on iplayer will be able to download the episode in Ultrahd, the first BBC programme to be available in such a high-quality format.